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
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...
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