Skip to main content

Promises Promises

Menzieshill Community Centre, Dundee
Four stars
When mercurial school-teacher Maggie Brodie click-clacks her way into 
the room in her bright red shoes and attitude to match, she can't fail 
to make an impression, not least of all on anyone who dares to cross 
her. There are plenty who do in Douglas Maxwell's troubling solo play, 
first seen in 2010, and revived here by Dundee Rep for a tour of 
community venues before a stint in the Highlands care of producing 
partner, Eden Court, Inverness.

With Maggie taking up a temporary post following a chequered past, also 
new to the school is a six year old Somalian girl called Rosie, who 
refuses to speak, and who her religious leaders say is possessed by the 
devil. With demons of her own to deal with, Maggie finds an affinity 
with Rosie, challenging what she sees as superstitious mumbo-jumbo 
before she discovers just how much damage a warped belief system can 
cause.

By having Maggie recognise so much of herself in Rosie, Maxwell 
explores a grey area of multi-cultural society rarely spoken of without 
some sensationalist agenda, where patriarchal orders can and do use 
tradition as an excuse to abuse women and children, whatever the 
particular faith.

Philip Howard's production puts the play's moral centre to the fore 
with a dynamic turn by Ann Louise Ross as Maggie. By turns vivacious, 
angry and increasingly vulnerable, Ross' performance is vivid, fearless 
and unflinching in its portrayal of a woman who absorbs a little girl's 
pain in a way that sees her become a kind of avenging angel. As Rosie 
goes out into the world, Maggie's final vow of silence might save her 
yet.

The Herald, October 30th 2013

ends

Comments

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

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

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