Tron Theatre, Glasgow
Four stars
Home is a dust-laden fortress for the ageless couple
at the heart of Martin McCormick’s new play, a tragi-comic leap down the rabbit
hole of what passes for domestic bliss in a place where time seems to have
stopped in a pre-mobile phone age. With their windows curtained off to the
outside world and the piled-up debris of a life alone together piled up around
them like the contents of a bombed-out junkyard, Ma and Pa’s world is enlivened
only by a mess of egg custards and a fridge full of tinnies. That and an
unspecified and possibly unreliable set of memories that hint at a past gone
mad only brought out into the open by the appearance from the bathroom of
seemingly normal female stranger, Neil. What follows is a riot of survival
strategies dressed up as old school social club cabaret.
McCormick’s most ambitious play to date is rich in
chewy non-sequiters that make for a set of wild and ear-poppingly baffling
one-liners that almost sing in their understanding of everyday private
languages between increasingly desperate co-dependants. Presented by the Tron
in association with the National Theatre of Scotland, Andy Arnold’s production
heightens the play’s dark ridiculousness to the max. This is enabled even more
by the tilted mani of Charlotte Lane’s set, which carpets its simple
living room with a post-apocalyptic greyness given an all-consuming wide-screen
treatment.
As Ma and Pa, Karen Dunbar and Gerry Mulgrew are an elliptical
mix of vaudevillian surrealism writ large, with Nalini Chetty’s Neil making for
the most reluctant but all too necessary audience to their well-worn barbs and
routines. When the real world comes crashing in, it’s as if a nuclear blast had
reignited life yet to come in a living comic strip that is both brutal and
troublingly hilarious.
The Herald, May 7th 2018
ends
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