The Hub, Pacific Quay, Glasgow 4 stars There has probably never been a more relevant week to premiere a dramatic dissection of whatever’s left of the newspaper industry, and the National Theatre of Scotland’s eloquently realised cut-up of interviews with some forty-three main-stage players goes way beyond any fears of self-reflexive brow-beating. While it will never top last week’s events at the Leveson inquiry when both Rupert and James Murdoch were forced to account for both their own actions and the culture of newspapers they were in charge of, Enquirer nevertheless paints a thought-provoking and oddly poignant portrait of a bruised industry being dragged through its own mud. As the audience enter the tellingly unused top-floor open-plan office of a real life media hub, the piles of unsold newspapers used as seats as we’re promenaded from desk to desk are even more telling about the state we’re in. From morning conference to putting the paper to bed, the story, as related by a fantastic cast of six playing composites of journalistic archetypes, is one of a high-pressure industry in free-fall, whose practitioners, as one subject says, are regarded by the public as “second-class citizens”. Shaped by co-directors Vicky Featherstone and John Tiffany with co-editor Andrew O’Hagan from interviews conducted by veteran journalists Paul Flynn, Deborah Orr and Ruth Wishart, the meta-narrative of such a construction may be plain to see. The interviews depicted are vital, however, with John Bett’s study of Times editor Roger Alton a hilarious counterpoint to Billy Riddoch as former Scottish Sun editor Jack Irvine and Maureen Beattie’s heartbreaking study of war reporter Ros Wynne-Jones. This is documentary theatre at its devastatingly incisive best. And that’s on the record. The Herald, April 30th 2012 ends
When Ron Butlin saw a man who’d just asked him the time throw himself under a train on the Paris Metro, it was a turning point in how his 1987 novel, The Sound Of My Voice, would turn out. Twenty years on, Butlin’s tale of suburban family man Morris Magellan’s existential crisis and his subsequent slide into alcoholism is regarded as a lost classic. Prime material, then, for the very intimate stage adaptation which opens in the Citizens Theatre’s tiny Stalls Studio tonight. “I had this friend in London who was an alcoholic,” Butlin recalls. “He would go off to work in the civil service in the morning looking absolutely immaculate. Then at night we’d meet, and he’s get mega-blootered, then go home and continue drinking and end up in a really bad state. I remember staying over one night, and he’d emerge from his room looking immaculate again. There was this huge contrast between what was going on outside and what was going on inside.” We’re sitting in a café on Edinburgh’s south sid
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