Skip to main content

Girl X

Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh
3 stars
Beneath a busy city underpass, seventeen people meet to talk, argue and
engage. The internet has gone down, so such real live flesh and blood
encounters are deemed necessary to allow a collective letting off of
steam. At the centre of this is actor and disabled activist Robert
Softley, who puts on the agenda the ethical dilemma of what to do when
the parents of a child with cerebral palsy decree to desexualise her,
stunting her growth and keeping her forever young. Out of this comes a
torrent of tangents, twists and turns any debate can veer off into,
online or otherwise. Taboos are broken, things are said in the heat of
the moment and at times things go too far. The conclusion? If there is
one, it’s left hanging, waiting for the next posting.

On one level Softley’s collaboration with Belgian director Pol Heyvaert
and dramaturg Bart Capelle for this contribution to the National
Theatre of Scotland’s Reveal season is community theatre writ large,
with the sixteen-strong choir squaring up to Softley en masse in a well
orchestrated fashion. On another, it’s a powerful soapbox for Softley
to vent his spleen on disabled politics in a mainstage public platform.

Whether it’s saying anything that can’t be found in an episode of Glee,
for instance is itself a matter for debate, but it nevertheless
challenges the wet liberal consensus by acknowledging things that would
normally be politely ignored, including the fact that projected
surtitles are being used because Softley’s voice isn’t always easy to
understand.
If it is to make a difference, Girl X probably needs to go further. As
a conversation piece, however, it’s a start.

The Herald, March 7th 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