Skip to main content

G.B.H. Or The Girl, The Boy And The Hag

Oran Mor, Glasgow
4 stars
An occasional criticism of Oran Mor’s A Play, A Pie And A Pint series of lunchtime theatre has been its material’s lack of ambition. There’s no danger of that in the literary debut of visual artist Adrian Wiszniewski, who not only morphs two fantastical myths into the same universe, but tells them via the presence of 25 members of the Scottish Philharmonic Orchestra, squeezed into the venue’s bijou floor-space under the command of composer Gordon Rigby.

Oran Mor’s subterranean confines are subsequently recast as The Glade nightclub, where drop-dead gorgeous Giselle and her Goth mates go wild. One night after closing time, our heroine stumbles on handsome Galahad, who’s been left for dead by the local rats. With a shapeshifting Hag also fancying her chances, Giselle is led on a breathless voyage, where she encounters unicorns, talking snakes and quite possibly true love.

Told by David Anderson as a louche nightclub raconteur, and accompanied by original slides to illustrate his yarn, Wiszniewski’s comic book reimagining is epic in both scope and execution. With Giselle herself immortalised as ‘a girl who looks just as good in black and white as she does in colour,’ what’s effectively a glorious old-fashioned romance recalls the contemporary sass of Buffy The Vampire Slayer.

Here too, a beautiful heroine warred against dark forces inbetween hanging out in an underground dive frequented by serious types clad in dark clothes, and was sometimes saved by a handsome stranger. Rigby’s Glasgow pastoral baroque is the star here, though, a delicious accompaniment to the beginning of a great adventure that can only get bigger.

Sponsored by Zoom

The Herald, February 20th 2007

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) ...

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...