Film City, Glasgow
4 stars
To suggest the art world is full of fakes is an understatement. That
they’re usually in the business of buying and selling rather than
artists themselves is also generally true. Maverick writer and director
David Leddy and his Fire Exit company tackles the art of faking it in a
fantastical flight of fancy that dissects the whole notion of
authenticity and finding truth through onstage artifice by leaving
everything exposed.
Actors Wendy Seager and Neil McCormack greet the audience as they enter
a room in Govan’s former town hall that’s part studio, part gallery
chock-full of apparent old masters draped in dust-sheets. The Jackson
Pollock style splurges that decorate the floor looks the part even
more. What we’re about to watch, Seager and McCormack explain, comes
from a real life meeting in a Glasgow bar between Leddy and a couple
slightly worse for wear.
The shaggy dog story that follows involves Liz and Jim, a couple of
extreme con artists who move from off-loading ‘vintage’ handbags on the
internet to flogging mass produced ‘Pollocks’ to international dealers.
With a motley crew of madams, mentors and others on the make in tow,
things may backfire spectacularly, but what a story.
Seager and McCormack switch identities and accent in an instant in
what, behind its caper movie trappings and meta-narrative conceit
featuring stage manager Sooz Scott Glen, is a perceptive and
penetrating expose of how capitalist market forces are getting away
with murder. As Liz and Jim’s world falls apart, its glossy veneer is
peeled away to reveal the human collateral damage at the bottom of the
food chain. We are all prostitutes, indeed.
The Herald, January 11th 2013
ends
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