While Theatre Uncut occupied a 10am slot each Monday morning of the
Fringe, the other six days of the week were equally occupied with
immediacy. Taking place at what in Edinburgh terms is a bleary-eyed
9am, this series of compendium of brand new works by largely
established writers allows them to run away with their imaginations in
a series of script in hand presentations, with half coming under the
directorship of Traverse artistic director Orla O'Loughlin, and half
with playwright David Greig.
The first week opened with Most Favoured, a look by David Ireland at
how the second coming might work out if it involved a KFC obsessed
angel and a far from virgin Mary in a cheap hotel room where a one
night stand suddenly becomes bigger than both of them. With Gabriel
Quigley's desperate singleton a priceless foil to Jordan McCurrach's
junk-food obsessed angel, Ireland has penned a scurrilously
sacrilegious bite-size sketch that one could imagine being developed
further into a fully-fledged sit-com.
Catterline was Bondagers writer Sue Glover's meditation on the very
singular artistic life led by painter Joan Eardley while living on the
east coast of Scotland in the early 1960s. With lover Lil Neilson and
kindred spirit Angus Neil rewinding the years, a languid and somewhat
ethereal portrait emerges of a free spirit getting by with her visions
as best she can. Anne Lacey has the perfect blend of fire and toughness
as Joan in an impressionistic piece of imagined history that might also
benefit from further development.
If Glover provided the voices of experience, Clean, by Sabrina
Mahfouz, was a genuine Fringe find. O'Loughlan saw Mahfouz's play, One
Hour Only, still playing at the Underbelly as part of the Old Vic New
Voices strand, and was smitten, immediately commissioning Mahfouz to
pen a Dream Play. Some-time performance poet Mahfouz rose to the
challenge, not with a piece of TV style naturalism, but by putting a
trio of gaming avatars onstage in an adventure that finds the feisty
trio speaking in rhyme before embarking on an adventure that will see
them become action heroes in a way that's normally left to little boys.
With Mahfouz herself topping and tailing the play, Clean is a
tremendously energetic diversion exposing a rich new voice steeped in
pop culture mores as much as theatrical ones.
While Rachel's House is an equally upfront work by Nicola McCartney,
who sees life through the troubled eyes of three women ex cons, all
with a story to tell before they embark on the path of freedom, things
only take a truly fantastical turn in Alan Wilkins' My Loneliness is
Killing Me. This at times hilarious litany of daily grumbles riffs on
its theme via a trio of voices, a ukulele, some tins of ravioli and a
title lifted from a Britney Spears song. In form, Wilkins has created a
kind of comic tone poem knee-deep in existential ennui even as it
becomes aware of its own ridiculousness.
The week ended, as it should, with sex and drugs and rock and roll,
Janice Galloway's look at a trio of would-be suicides in a psychiatric
ward. Like Wilkins, Galloway, whose stage adaptation of her novel, The
Trick is to Keep Breathing, might well have formed the template for
Dream Plays, fully embraces the opportunity to run riot on page and
stage. As a body of work, all this adds up to a refreshingly audacious
exploration of theatrical language. While some are works in progress,
others exist solely for the moment.
Such quick-fire immediacy is a very telling calling card too for
O'Loughlin, who, in her first Fringe season since her appointment, is
here putting her artistic cards on the table, as well as exploring her
own relationships with actors and writers she may not have worked with
before. With the ever inventive, ever curious Greig at her side,
O'Loughlin is effectively mid-way through a crash-course in Traverse
Theatre culture, past, present and future which she is also reinventing
as she goes. With a cup of tea and a bacon roll to help you along,
Dream Plays thus far has been a delicious concoction to wake up to.
The Herald, August 23rd 2012
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