Citizens Theatre, Glasgow
Four stars
Accompanying all this in Matthew Lenton's beautifully nuanced production of a text knitted together by Grierson is a barn-stormingly good five-piece band led by composer James Fortune. Their rollicking new arrangements of Cutler's songs reinvent them as a colourful riot of Klezmer, Calypso and Indian Ragas to shed vivid life on Cutler's unique form of Zen absurdist music hall.
The Herald, April 14th 2014
Four stars
It's the voice of God you hear first in
Vanishing Point's exquisitely realised impressionistic evocation of
the life and times of the poet and song-writer whose influence on
popular culture over the last half century is only now being fully
recognised. It's a jolly voice compared to the deadpan melancholy of
Ivor Cutler's own, but this unseen presence points up Cutler's own
uneasy relationship with religious beliefs of all persuasions, even
as this co-production with the National Theatre of Scotland is as
much a spiritual meditation as any liturgy.
Using a framing device of an actual
meeting between actor Sandy Grierson, who plays Cutler, with Cutler's
partner Phyllis King below the Kentish Town flat where Cutler once
lived, the first half is a celestial radio play that shows how a
dreamy boy from Ibrox went from life as a pilot and a teacher to an
underground cult figure and star of TV and radio. These scenes give
us a glimpse of what shaped Cutler's mind even as they explore how
such a remarkable life can be translated into the play we're
watching. The second half shifts in tone to something more elegiac as
it focuses on Cutler and King's love story, and a personal and
artistic bond that proved indestructible even as Cutler slid gently
into old age.
Accompanying all this in Matthew Lenton's beautifully nuanced production of a text knitted together by Grierson is a barn-stormingly good five-piece band led by composer James Fortune. Their rollicking new arrangements of Cutler's songs reinvent them as a colourful riot of Klezmer, Calypso and Indian Ragas to shed vivid life on Cutler's unique form of Zen absurdist music hall.
Elicia Daly makes a poignant Phyllis,
while guitarist Ed Gaughan provides an array of comic voices that
include Ned Sherrin and Paul McCartney. It is Grierson's remarkably
observed study of Cutler, however, that carries the show as he
charmingly and movingly captures his subject's sense of wonder even
at his frailest in this most tender and loving of homages to a true
genius.
The Herald, April 14th 2014
ends
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