Tron Theatre, Glasgow
3 stars
“Married?” says one character in the first of two darker-than-you-think
plays by Johnny McKnight for his and Julie Brown’s Random Accomplice
company. “It’s not ideal, but neither is being single.” It’s such
bittersweet truisms that fuel Mary Massacre, in which two very
different women hitch a ride on an emotional rollercoaster to become
unwitting adversaries turned allies. In the second half, Seven Year
Itch takes office politics to the extreme in a world where the voice of
God sounds like Dolly Parton, and top secret memos aren’t the only
things that get shredded.
Both pieces start off with McKnight’s trademark high-camp accentuated
by Lisa Sangster’s inventively lush sets. The sparkly letters that
spell out the word ‘FAIR’ in Mary Massacre might easily be appended by
a question mark, as married lush Jenny and single girl Leyla dovetail
monologues that sound straight off Jeremy Kyle but end up more a Roald
Dahl style tale of the unexpected.
The lime-green open-plan office suite that hosts Seven Year Itch
becomes the backdrop to a multi-layered forensic investigation of an
everyday murder dressed up by its narrators to map out a life and death
less ordinary. What is already a post-modern sit-com takes a
psycho-sexual turn to resemble some of Dennis Cooper’s more grisly true
life yarns.
Brown’s production plays on the polarities of each of McKnight’s
troubled souls in what is effectively a pair of contemporary revenge
comedies. There’s an over-riding archness in all the performances, with
Julie Wilson-Nimmo and Mary Gapinski in Mary Massacre and Brown herself
alongside Martin McCormick in Seven Year Itch pointing up the
double-bluffing grotesquery of a candy-floss world turned bad.
The Herald, February 20th 2012
ends
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