Skip to main content

Running on the Cracks

Tron Theatre, Glasgow
4 stars

It’s a mad world for the runaway teenager in Gruffalo author Julia Donaldson’s novel for young people, adapted here by Tron artistic director Andy Arnold for Katie Posner’s dark, fast-moving co-production with York’s Pilot Theatre. The play follows the perils of Leonora, or Leo, the orphaned Anglo-Chinese daughter of musicians, who goes on the run from her creepy Uncle John in search of her Chinese grand-parents in Glasgow.
Once on the streets, Leo falls in with the city’s fractured flotsam and jetsam who’ve fallen outside society’s loop, finding sanctuary with Gayle Runciman’s Mary, who survives by dancing to Johnny Cash records at full blast. With paper boy and would-be gumshoe Finlay as a sidekick, Leo’s search is as much for herself as anything else.

With five actors clambering across Gem Greaves’ impressionistic set, and pulsed along by RJ McConnell’s burbling sound design, Arnold and Posner capture the full urgency of Leo’s plight from the get-go. Yet, for all its big-city grit, there’s something of an old-school film noir in Donaldson’s yarn, even as it squares up to some very uneasy truths. In this respect, with Stephen Clyde’s Uncle John in hot pursuit and a million Chinese restaurants holding potential clues, it becomes part detective story, part thriller, and part quest for cultural and personal identity.
Jessica Henwick’s Leo becomes a Dickensian pivot on which the play hangs, with Grant McDonald’s Finlay becoming her urchin-like foil. By the end, Leo, Finlay and even Mary may have found some kind of redemption, but, as is hinted at strongly by the lingering presence of Uncle John, they’re far from home and dry.

The Herald, February 8th 2013
ends
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Losing Touch With My Mind - Psychedelia in Britain 1986-1990

DISC 1 1. THE STONE ROSES   -  Don’t Stop 2. SPACEMEN 3   -  Losing Touch With My Mind (Demo) 3. THE MODERN ART   -  Mind Train 4. 14 ICED BEARS   -  Mother Sleep 5. RED CHAIR FADEAWAY  -  Myra 6. BIFF BANG POW!   -  Five Minutes In The Life Of Greenwood Goulding 7. THE STAIRS  -  I Remember A Day 8. THE PRISONERS  -  In From The Cold 9. THE TELESCOPES   -  Everso 10. THE SEERS   -  Psych Out 11. MAGIC MUSHROOM BAND  -  You Can Be My L-S-D 12. THE HONEY SMUGGLERS  - Smokey Ice-Cream 13. THE MOONFLOWERS  -  We Dig Your Earth 14. THE SUGAR BATTLE   -  Colliding Minds 15. GOL GAPPAS   -  Albert Parker 16. PAUL ROLAND  -  In The Opium Den 17. THE THANES  -  Days Go Slowly By 18. THEE HYPNOTICS   -  Justice In Freedom (12" Version) ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Edinburgh Rocks – The Capital's Music Scene in the 1950s and Early 1960s

Edinburgh has always been a vintage city. Yet, for youngsters growing up in the shadow of World War Two as well as a pervading air of tight-lipped Calvinism, they were dreich times indeed. The founding of the Edinburgh International Festival in 1947 and the subsequent Fringe it spawned may have livened up the city for a couple of weeks in August as long as you were fans of theatre, opera and classical music, but the pubs still shut early, and on Sundays weren't open at all. But Edinburgh too has always had a flipside beyond such official channels, and, in a twitch-hipped expression of the sort of cultural duality Robert Louis Stevenson recognised in his novel, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, a vibrant dance-hall scene grew up across the city. Audiences flocked to emporiums such as the Cavendish in Tollcross, the Eldorado in Leith, The Plaza in Morningside and, most glamorous of all due to its revolving stage, the Palais in Fountainbridge. Here the likes of Joe Loss and Ted Heath broug...
2 comments
Read more

Carla Lane – The Liver Birds, Mersey Beat and Counter Cultural Performance Poetry

Last week's sad passing of TV sit-com writer Carla Lane aged 87 marks another nail in the coffin of what many regard as a golden era of TV comedy. It was an era rooted in overly-bright living room sets where everyday plays for today were acted out in front of a live audience in a way that happens differently today. If Lane had been starting out now, chances are that the middlebrow melancholy of Butterflies, in which over four series between 1978 and 1983, Wendy Craig's suburban housewife Ria flirted with the idea of committing adultery with successful businessman Leonard, would have been filmed without a laughter track and billed as a dramady. Lane's finest half-hour highlighted a confused, quietly desperate and utterly British response to the new freedoms afforded women over the previous decade as they trickled down the class system in the most genteel of ways. This may have been drawn from Lane's own not-quite free-spirited quest for adventure as she moved through h...
Post a Comment
Read more