Tramway, Glasgow
4 stars The week-long residency at Tramway by maverick producers, Fuel, continued in the tone set by David Rosenberg’s opening sonic adventure, Ring, of invading our space and subverting our senses. The rest of the programme was by turns arresting, provocative and, at its best, deeply political, both on a personal and a global level. Nowhere was this mashed up more than in Make Better Please, Unexpected Guests’ latest meditation on how we live now. This began with focus group style round-table discussions on news events of the day, and ended with a collective purging of the mess of twenty-first century secularised culture discussed earlier. Following a succession of quick-fire role-plays, things grew increasingly frantic, as one of our hosts took on the sins of David Cameron, Jimmy Savile, George Osborne and all the rest. Pulsed along by a punk-style din, this was Unexpected Guests getting back to their and our roots, where the primitive power of the tribe put their faith in shamanic ritual to heal them. Such a collective release may not change anything, but in a work that is the contrasting light to Ring’s shade, it made for an exhilarating form of audience participation. .One of our guides in Make Better Please was Lewis Gibson, who was also one of the artists in The Simple Things of Life, in which five artists created work in garden sheds. The full version scooped a Bank of Scotland Herald Angel Award in 2011. Two of the constructions – Gibson’s Lost in Words and Frauke Requardt’s appositely wordless Makiko’s Shed – moved into Tramway to allow audiences of eight to share their creators’ very private pleasures. Gibson invited us in to a vintage world of 3D postcards viewed through old-school Viewfinders and a book group which allowed you to make your own narrative. Requardt filled his red-painted shed full of mirrors so performer Makiko Aoyama could see every flex, twirl and grimace as she jumped for joy and danced like her life depended on it. On the surface, Inua Ellams’ solo play, Black T-Shirt Collection, was the most classically conventional of this Fuelfest grab-bag. Yet this startling and vividly told tale of two Nigerian foster brothers’ rise and fall via the customised t-shirt business that drives them was a culmination of all the Fuel roster’s concerns. By having one brother Muslim, the other a Christian, there were already biblical implications to Ellams’ tale. Once Nigerian homophobia drives the brothers out from their market stall, first to Egypt, then London and the cheap Chinese sweat-shops beyond, a rich tapestry of corruption and exploitation is laid bare in a moral fable that may be ancient in content, but is made troublingly contemporary by Ellams’ reimagining. With roots in the spoken-word scene, Ellams is a captivating presence, who lends both a hipness and a seriousness of intent that’s accentuated by Emma Laxton’s sound design and Ellams’ own chalk-like graphics projected behind him. All this made for a truly startling performance that formed part of an even more inspirational week. The Herald, November 26th 2012 ends
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