Skip to main content

549: Scots of the Spanish Civil War


Citizens Theatre, Glasgow
Four stars

Four lads play cards in a quiet pub in the town they’ve known since they were born. One of them plays guitar in the corner, plucking out the accidental soundtrack to their lives. Come last orders, and all these boys’ arguments forged by shared experience – working class Tory, socialist idealist, hot head looking for a way out, and apathetic cynic – will be forgotten, washed away at the bottom of a pint glass.

Eighty years before, a bunch of young men just like them took a different course of action, as is made clear when the ghost of old-timer George Watters wanders into Jack Nurse and Robbie Gordon’s new play for their increasingly expansive Wonder Fools company. Developed over an eighteen-month research period, Nurse and Gordon’s play gives voice to the 549 men who left Scotland in 1936 for Spain, where they fought against fascism with the International Brigades. This is done by having four of the six performers onstage embody the spirits of the Prestonpans-born quartet who joined up for very different reasons.

Produced in association with Citizens Theatre and the Brunton Theatre, Musselburgh, Nurse   and Gordon’s piece at first looks like a reminiscence project writ large. Things quickly transcend by way of some fantastic set-pieces, which utilise choreography, music and pub furniture in a way that resembles Black Watch reimagined for a small town function room. Out of this comes a heartfelt tribute that’s full of warmth as it brings the fallen back to life to show the power of uniting against oppressive forces. There is much to learn here in a piece that puts faith in the belief that, despite all the bombs and bullets being thrown at you, the world really can be changed for the better.

The Herald, February 16th 2018

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