Skip to main content

And Then Come the Nightjars

Byre Theatre, St Andrews
Three stars

The barn may initially appear biblical at the opening of Bea Roberts' play, revived for a short tour of the Scottish countryside after being seen in London and Bristol throughout 2015. The wise men who occupy it, however, have precious few gifts left to give in an at times brutal treatise on country matters. It begins in 2001, when South Devon vet Jeff and farmer Michael are holed up with Michael's cattle in the thick of the foot and mouth scare that decimated the rural landscape at the time. As the pair spar their way through a crisis that lays bare their more personal losses, the lives of both men are changed forever as they find some kind of grim solidarity amongst all the despair.

Paul Robinson's original production for Theatre503 and Bristol Old Vic is overseen here by a partnership of Perth Theatre and Theatre by the Lake, Keswick. Over its seventy-five minutes, the play highlights a way of life under siege in a rural world that's as prone to fall prey to gentrification hungry developers as much as those living in the city.

As played by Nigel Hastings and Finlay Welsh, Jeffrey and Michael are like Beckettian dinosaurs who refuse to be killed off. There are moments between the two men that can't help but remind one too of the tragi-comic cross-class alliance between Ted and Ralph in The Fast Show. Any lingering pathos that might be there is offset by a coarser form of co-dependence that reveals the reluctant friendship of a pair of relics who survive the worst by refusing to play dead.

The Herald, April 13th 2017

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