Platform, Easterhouse
4 stars A sense of balance is what’s yearned after by the four women in Linda Mclean’s remarkable new work for Magnetic North. If such a yearning is evident in the cascade of chairs suspended in infinite mid-air above what could be dance-floor, chess-board or op-art installation in Claire Halleran’s design, it pours through the torrent of words that present four very different but umbilically connected portraits of a woman’s world at different points in the twentieth century. All in different ways are struggling, be it for simple pleasure, escape from their lot or else out and out transcendence. As each tries to better themselves, through the liberty of earning their own living, the promise of domestic bliss or an education and the exotic allure of other cultures, their ambitions are thwarted, sometimes brutally. Rather than fake an attempt at Sunday serial naturalism the above might suggest, McLean’s writing itself steps beyond its immediate milieu to become a vocal symphony of drudgery and desire. This is captured confidently by director Nicholas Bone, as the quartet’s words overlap or fall into each other like dominoes that have found connection enough to enable their next move. McLean’s women may be abstractions, but they are more flesh and blood than the mere ciphers to hang an idea upon they so could’ve been. As the four, Ashley Smith, Lesley Hart, Louise Ludgate and Natalie Wallace sustain the play’s full hour onstage throughout with an intensely realised sense of restraint. With Kim Moore’s violin and cello-based score lending even more drive to things, the release, when it comes, points to even greater life to come. The Herald, October 1st 2012 ends
Comments