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
Intro – Snapshots – Deaf School
1
In 1980, the same year as the Manchester band, Magazine, released a 7
inch single called A Song From Under The Floorboards – a three verse
and chorus distillation of Dostoyevsky's novel, Notes From Underground
– an art school scandal occurred.
This scandal took place in Liverpool, and was based around a project
called the Furbelows, although it became better known in the Liverpool
Echo and other organs that reported it as the Woolly Nudes.
The Furbelows, or Woolly Nudes, were a group of artists who had come
out of Liverpool College of Art, who, dressed in grotesque woolly
costumes which featured knitted approximations of male and female
genitalia, made assorted public interventions around the city centre as
kind of living sculptures acting out assorted narratives.
The Furbelows project had been funded by what was then Merseyside Arts
Association, and, after the participants were arrested and taken to
court on obscenity charges after what…
1
In 1980, the same year as the Manchester band, Magazine, released a 7
inch single called A Song From Under The Floorboards – a three verse
and chorus distillation of Dostoyevsky's novel, Notes From Underground
– an art school scandal occurred.
This scandal took place in Liverpool, and was based around a project
called the Furbelows, although it became better known in the Liverpool
Echo and other organs that reported it as the Woolly Nudes.
The Furbelows, or Woolly Nudes, were a group of artists who had come
out of Liverpool College of Art, who, dressed in grotesque woolly
costumes which featured knitted approximations of male and female
genitalia, made assorted public interventions around the city centre as
kind of living sculptures acting out assorted narratives.
The Furbelows project had been funded by what was then Merseyside Arts
Association, and, after the participants were arrested and taken to
court on obscenity charges after what…
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