Tron Theatre, Glasgow 4 stars Anyone expecting Marie Jones’ ingenious two-hander about a Hollywood film crew descending on a rural Irish village to be a full-on knockabout romp is in for a surprise. Because so adept is Jones at the theatrical and comedic double-bluff that what starts out as a sit-com style yarn about a couple of film extras on the make becomes both an elegy for a dying community and an artistic call to arms against a form of colonialism that denigrates the culture it feeds off. Some sixteen years after the play first appeared, Andy Arnold’s new production for the Tron arrives with a renewed vigour perhaps informed by the current climate of recession. Jake and Charlie meet on the set of a tax-break enabled windswept epic being shot on their doorsteps, and featuring a real-life big-screen starlet as the female lead. For an impoverished work-force, the forty quid a day the men earn is easy pickings. When a teenage drug addict is found dead in the river after being refused a job on the film before being thrown out of his local, the initially hilarious war of attrition between Jake and Charlie on one side and a roll-call of film crew flunkies takes an altogether more serious turn. By having two actors play all the parts, Jones not only embraces a poor theatre aesthetic, she also sets up a fantastic vehicle for actors to leap aboard. Keith Fleming and Robbie Jack do this with slick, well-drilled aplomb without ever losing sight of the play’s serious points. As an intelligently populist crowd-pleaser, it can’t fail. As a critique of the ongoing corruption of mass entertainment, it’s deadly. The Herald, July 12th 2012 ends
Edinburgh Playhouse Five stars A big National Coal Board sign looms large at the opening of Lee Hall and Elton John's decade-old musical stage version of Hall and director Stephen Daldry's hit turn of the century film. In a tale of one little boy's liberation as a dancer against the backdrop of the 1980s miners strike, however, the Durham Miners banner and the 'Save Our Community' sash held aloft matter more. It is this call to arms that forms the heart of Daldry's production, as Billy becomes a potty-mouthed beacon of hope in a situation where picket line, thin blue line and chorus line rub uneasily up against each other. Given such a context, there is bound to be some pretty grown-up stuff going on here, be it the institutionalised homophobia in Billy's village, the class war going on within it, or Billy's grieving for his dead mother that drives his every move. And, as so magnificently choreographed by Peter Darling, what moves they are. Watch...
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