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

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) ...

Myra Mcfadyen - An Obituary

Myra McFadyen – Actress   Born January 12th 1956; died October 18th 2024   Myra McFadyen, who has died aged 68, was an actress who brought a mercurial mix of lightness and depth to her work on stage and screen. Playwright and artistic director of the Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh, David Greig, called McFadyen “an utterly transformative, shamanic actor who could change a room and command an audience with a blink”. Citizens’ Theatre artistic director Dominic Hill described McFadyen’s portrayal of Puck in his 2019 production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre in London as “funny, mischievous and ultimately heartbreaking.”   For many, McFadyen will be most recognisable from Mamma Mia!, the smash hit musical based around ABBA songs. McFadyen spent two years on the West End in Phyllida Lloyd’s original 1999 stage production, and was in both film offshoots. Other big screen turns included Rob Roy (1995) and Our Ladies (2019), both directed by Mi...

The Passage – Hip Rebel Degenerates: Black, White and Red All Over

Prelude – The Power of Three   Fear. Power. Love. This life-and-death (un)holy trinity was the driving force and raisons d’être of The Passage, the still largely unsung Manchester band sired in what we now call the post-punk era, and who between 1978 and 1983 released four albums and a handful of singles.    Led primarily by composer Dick Witts, The Passage bridged the divide between contemporary classical composition and electronic pop as much as between the personal and the political. In the oppositional hotbed of Margaret Thatcher’s first landslide, The Passage fused agit-prop and angst, and released a song called Troops Out as a single. The song offered unequivocal support for withdrawing British troops from Northern Ireland.    They wrote Anderton’s Hall, about Greater Manchester’s born again right wing police chief, James Anderton, and, on Dark Times, rubbed Brechtian polemic up against dancefloor hedonism. On XOYO, their most commercial and potentially mo...