Royal Lyceum Theatre 4 stars On a movie screen, a terrified young woman is pleading for her life in what could be a scene from a lo-fi horror flick. The next time we see the woman we find out is called Alice, she’s in front of a camera again, just as scared as she auditions for a hard-core porn film. Is Alice for real here, or is she faking it, to death if necessary? These are some of the questions being asked by director Matthew Lenton in Vanishing Point’s look at the dark side of pornography, co-produced with two Italian companies and Trmway, Glasgow. Here, as Alice’s tale is paralleled by an internet porn addict’s own descent, performers, directors and consumers become complicit in some psycho-sexual rabbit hole where love, erotica and even cheap thrills are forsaken in favour of what looks like extreme forms of mutual abuse. The third in Vanishing Point’s loose-knit trilogy of impressionistic works seen largely behind glass, where Interiors and Saturday Night looked at the public and private tics of human behaviour, Wonderland is the dirty little secret lurking behind both. While there is much more heard dialogue here than in the other two pieces, the images played out on Kai Fischer’s set and pulsed along by Mark Melville’s brooding score are snapshots from the grimmest of fantasias. As Alice, Jenny Hulse is unflinching as she leads a Scots-Italian cast of seven through some of the play’s starker, more naturalistic moments. The “normal, healthy individual” played by Paul Thomas Hickey’ is even more troubling. It’s the matter-of-factness that scares the most in a brave and deeply serious theatrical meditation on the uglier aspects of the sex industry today. The Herald, August 30th 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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