Skip to main content

Anna Weiss

Tron Theatre, Glasgow
3 stars
When Mike Cullen's play about a hypnotherapist, the young woman she 
treats and the young woman's father appeared in 1997, it was 
devastatingly timely. Sexual abuse of children by their families was 
being exposed in a way it never had been before, but so was False 
Memory Syndrome, whereby seemingly long-buried traumas were 'revealed.' 
Almost sixteen years on, and Cullen's play is no less breath-taking in 
Rekindle Theatre's intense and up close and personal revival.

It begins with Anna and her live-in patient Lynn surrounded by boxes 
all neatly packed with forgotten memories in a limbo between the past, 
present and a brand new future. As Lynn frantically rummages around for 
a long lost photograph, the pair spar with the brutality only 
co-dependents can muster. Lynn has invited her father who may or may 
not have abused her to visit in order to confront him. Anna doesn't 
approve, even less so when David appears.

For seventy-five emotionally relentless minutes, a troubling portrait 
of fractured lives is laid out in the rawest of fashions. Cullen's 
lines are like knives, stabbing out accusingly in little staccato 
assaults until one or other character crumbles. Such meticulously 
constructed barbs require subtlety rather than hysteria, and while 
Janette Foggo's production isn't quite the revival the play deserves, 
Kirstin McLean's Anna is as manipulative as she is brittle, while 
Joanne Thomson's Lynn is equally fragile.

The play's ambiguity remains, however, and it's perhaps for that very 
reason it's been neglected for so long. With everything that's happened 
since it was first seen, the psychological scars it picks at have 
become even more real than they did before.


The Herald, March 29th 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) 1. THE STONE ROSES    Don’t Stop ( Silvertone   ORE   1989) The trip didn’t quite start here for what sounds like Waterfall played backwards on The Stone Roses’ era-defining eponymous debut album, but it sounds
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