Tron Theatre, Glasgow
4 stars There’s something naively life-affirming about Colin Higgins’ love story between well-heeled nihilistic teenager Harold and seventy-nine year old free-spirit, Maude. Higgins’ own stage version of the 1971 cult film he scripted for director Hal Ashby was a commercial flop on Broadway, and it’s not difficult to see why from Theatre Jezebel’s Glasgay! revival. It’s not that it’s bad. It’s just that a black comedy based around a kid who fakes multiple suicides inbetween hanging around funerals makes more sense now than it probably did during that awkward period in American social history when the summer of love had given way to something darker and more cynical. While Kenny Miller’s vivid, scarlet-coloured production taps into the play’s period oddity, it also shines a beacon on how disaffected youth can be woken up to life by their elders in a way that might easily be applied to today. Miller allows his cast to breeze through what becomes an off-kilter comic romp with a set of heightened performances to suit. In the central roles, Tommy Bastow’s sullen brattishness as Harold is offset by Vari Sylvester’s deliciously kooky vivaciousness as Maude. There’s dry support too from Anita Vettesse as Harold’s distracted mother and Richard Conlon as the inevitably sex-obsessed therapist. There’s a wonderfully confused exchange between Sylvester and Vettesse as it slowly dawns on Harold’s mother that the girl of her boy’s dreams is actually standing before her. The pathos that follows during Maude’s eightieth birthday celebrations may be a final fling for her, but it’s as if Harold has just woken up to life in this sweetest of counter-cultural curios. The Herald, November 2nd 2012 ends
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