Citizens Theatre, Glasgow
3 stars
Almost forty years after Anthony Burgess's 1962 novella of juvenile
delinquency, today's twenty-first century post conscription, post
short-sharp-shock, post ASBO age now seems like prophecy. Jeremy
Raison’s main-stage revival of Burgess's stage version attempts to
reinvent hyper-articulate tearaway Alex’s rake’s progress away from the
iconography of Stanley Kubrick’s film version much of early 1970s yob
culture was initially blamed on before Kubrick withdrew it from
circulation.
Despite a few nods to contemporary violence via Alex’s exposure to
footage of water-boarding torture in Guantanomo Bay and other fresh
atrocities, however, it doesn’t always work. For all its good
intentions, such literalism rubs up against much of Burgess’s crudely
simplistic philosophy and baroque verbal flights of fancy elevated by
his invented Nadsat patois.
At the start of the play, Alex and pals are a group of pure pleasure
seekers whose raging hormones can only find release through sex,
violence and usually a combination of both. Alex, however, is a secret
aesthete, a slum-dwelling intellectual who finds redemption through
Beethoven rather than the pumping dance beats down at the Korova milk
bar. In another life, he’d probably be a protégé. It’s unfortunate that
Jay Taylor’s Alex and his uber-cool droogs look like they’d fallen out
of the latest hip Shoreditch hang-out, while the soundtrack fails to
acknowledge how loved-up club culture effectively neutered football
violence for a while in the 1990s.
This doesn’t make the strutting choreographed appeal of the show
redundant, however. What’s needed instead, however, is a brand new
voice from the front-line to tell it how it is before they’re
normalised. Chances are, however, the response would be a polite but
firm ‘Yarbles to that.’
The Herald, October 18th 2010
ends
3 stars
Almost forty years after Anthony Burgess's 1962 novella of juvenile
delinquency, today's twenty-first century post conscription, post
short-sharp-shock, post ASBO age now seems like prophecy. Jeremy
Raison’s main-stage revival of Burgess's stage version attempts to
reinvent hyper-articulate tearaway Alex’s rake’s progress away from the
iconography of Stanley Kubrick’s film version much of early 1970s yob
culture was initially blamed on before Kubrick withdrew it from
circulation.
Despite a few nods to contemporary violence via Alex’s exposure to
footage of water-boarding torture in Guantanomo Bay and other fresh
atrocities, however, it doesn’t always work. For all its good
intentions, such literalism rubs up against much of Burgess’s crudely
simplistic philosophy and baroque verbal flights of fancy elevated by
his invented Nadsat patois.
At the start of the play, Alex and pals are a group of pure pleasure
seekers whose raging hormones can only find release through sex,
violence and usually a combination of both. Alex, however, is a secret
aesthete, a slum-dwelling intellectual who finds redemption through
Beethoven rather than the pumping dance beats down at the Korova milk
bar. In another life, he’d probably be a protégé. It’s unfortunate that
Jay Taylor’s Alex and his uber-cool droogs look like they’d fallen out
of the latest hip Shoreditch hang-out, while the soundtrack fails to
acknowledge how loved-up club culture effectively neutered football
violence for a while in the 1990s.
This doesn’t make the strutting choreographed appeal of the show
redundant, however. What’s needed instead, however, is a brand new
voice from the front-line to tell it how it is before they’re
normalised. Chances are, however, the response would be a polite but
firm ‘Yarbles to that.’
The Herald, October 18th 2010
ends
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