Skip to main content

The Making of Us

Tramway, Glasgow
3 stars
When film and theatre director Lindsay Anderson  allowed his own
cameras to be seen filming the action of Alan Bennett’s 1979 TV play,
The Old Crowd, it caused a tabloid outcry. Anderson had used a similar
device in his film, O! Lucky Man, which ended with actor Malcolm
McDowell seemingly auditioning for Anderson’s previous feature, If…

One is reminded of this stepping into the latest collaboration between
Suspect Culture director Graham Eatough and visual artist Graham Fagen, 
with a major contribution here from film director Michael McDonough.
Commissioned by Glasgow International Festival of Visual Art and
co-presented by the National Theatre of Scotland, The Making of Us
opens by having the audience sign a disclaimer that allows them to be
filmed, before we’re ushered into a room that is part film set, part
installation akin to Eatough and Fagen’s Killing Time project at Dundee
Contemporary Arts.

With the cameras rolling, bar-maid Helen encourages punter Jonathan,
played by Ali Craig, to take part in a film being directed by Michael.
Shunted from bar to hotel room to anonymous offices before ending
beside a solitary Beckettian tree, Jonathan appears to have given his
entire life to an all-consuming project we’re all complicit in. With
Eatough and Fagen onstage themselves shifting scenery or else directing
a film crew that is both fictional and actual, on one level this is an
extravagant close up on the tedious glamour of a film set.

More significantly, perhaps, as Lucianne McEvoy’s Helen and Keith
Fleming’s Michael conspire to manipulate Jonathan’s narrative for their
own ends, everything is on show in a series of infinite, Russian doll
style meta-narratives that flag up the endless possibilities of
artifice and truth in a reality TV age.


The Herald, April 23rd 2012

ends



















Labels:




































Comments








Post a Comment













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) ...




















Post a Comment









Read more




























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...




















2 comments









Read more




























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...




















Post a Comment









Read more