Skip to main content

Gagarin Way - Review

Carnegie Hall, Dunfermline
4 stars
When Gregory Burke’s devastatingly funny treatise on socialism,
capitalism and Fife’s most rubbish terrorist cell first appeared a
decade ago, ideology was believed to have died in what looked like a
post-political age. Like a slow-burning grenade lodged on some mythical
barricades, however, in today’s post 9/11, post 7/7, post-recessionary
climate of student riots and public anger with the banks, Rapture
Theatre’s revisiting of the play now looks like a hugely instructive
period piece.

Sentimental trade-unionist Gary and thrill-seeking auto-didact Eddie
kidnap what they believe to be a Japanese industrialist in the
Dunfermline factory they slave in every day. When victim Frank turns
out to be a Leven ex-pat just as disillusioned as them, the debate that
ensues goes beyond the high-minded theory of ex politics student and
security guard Tom to take a more nihilistic approach.

It’s still a brilliant idea, putting the all too often abstracted and
romantic idea of direct action on our own doorstep, particularly on
this lengthy tour that opened in Dunfermline itself, even if history
has caught up with such notions. Michael Emans’ production points up
what is essential a series of extended monologues ricocheting between
the quartet with a deadly edge to every one-liner. This is particularly
apparent in Jordan Young’s controlled, razor-sharp portrayal of Eddie,
a masterly study of how intelligence and energy can be wasted, not even
on an empty cause, but on violence for its own end. These days Eddie
would be on the football terraces or finding salvation in the English
Defence League. As it is, in the perennially capitalist world, apart
from the revolution, it’s another working day.

The Herald, February 21st 2011

ends

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Losing Touch With My Mind - Psychedelia in Britain 1986-1990

DISC 1 1. THE STONE ROSES   -  Don’t Stop 2. SPACEMEN 3   -  Losing Touch With My Mind (Demo) 3. THE MODERN ART   -  Mind Train 4. 14 ICED BEARS   -  Mother Sleep 5. RED CHAIR FADEAWAY  -  Myra 6. BIFF BANG POW!   -  Five Minutes In The Life Of Greenwood Goulding 7. THE STAIRS  -  I Remember A Day 8. THE PRISONERS  -  In From The Cold 9. THE TELESCOPES   -  Everso 10. THE SEERS   -  Psych Out 11. MAGIC MUSHROOM BAND  -  You Can Be My L-S-D 12. THE HONEY SMUGGLERS  - Smokey Ice-Cream 13. THE MOONFLOWERS  -  We Dig Your Earth 14. THE SUGAR BATTLE   -  Colliding Minds 15. GOL GAPPAS   -  Albert Parker 16. PAUL ROLAND  -  In The Opium Den 17. THE THANES  -  Days Go Slowly By 18. THEE HYPNOTICS   -  Justice In Freedom (12" Version) 1. THE STONE ROSES    Don’t Stop ( Silvertone   ORE   1989) The trip didn’t quite start here for what sounds like Waterfall played backwards on The Stone Roses’ era-defining eponymous debut album, but it sounds

Edinburgh Rocks – The Capital's Music Scene in the 1950s and Early 1960s

Edinburgh has always been a vintage city. Yet, for youngsters growing up in the shadow of World War Two as well as a pervading air of tight-lipped Calvinism, they were dreich times indeed. The founding of the Edinburgh International Festival in 1947 and the subsequent Fringe it spawned may have livened up the city for a couple of weeks in August as long as you were fans of theatre, opera and classical music, but the pubs still shut early, and on Sundays weren't open at all. But Edinburgh too has always had a flipside beyond such official channels, and, in a twitch-hipped expression of the sort of cultural duality Robert Louis Stevenson recognised in his novel, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, a vibrant dance-hall scene grew up across the city. Audiences flocked to emporiums such as the Cavendish in Tollcross, the Eldorado in Leith, The Plaza in Morningside and, most glamorous of all due to its revolving stage, the Palais in Fountainbridge. Here the likes of Joe Loss and Ted Heath broug

Carla Lane – The Liver Birds, Mersey Beat and Counter Cultural Performance Poetry

Last week's sad passing of TV sit-com writer Carla Lane aged 87 marks another nail in the coffin of what many regard as a golden era of TV comedy. It was an era rooted in overly-bright living room sets where everyday plays for today were acted out in front of a live audience in a way that happens differently today. If Lane had been starting out now, chances are that the middlebrow melancholy of Butterflies, in which over four series between 1978 and 1983, Wendy Craig's suburban housewife Ria flirted with the idea of committing adultery with successful businessman Leonard, would have been filmed without a laughter track and billed as a dramady. Lane's finest half-hour highlighted a confused, quietly desperate and utterly British response to the new freedoms afforded women over the previous decade as they trickled down the class system in the most genteel of ways. This may have been drawn from Lane's own not-quite free-spirited quest for adventure as she moved through h