Skip to main content

Fringe Theatre 2018 - Check Up, Traverse Theatre, Four stars / The Abode, Underbelly, Four stars

Mark Thomas should be on prescription. While the relationship between good health and humour has long been established, the only danger of Thomas’ latest show, Check Up, is that it may make you angry enough to burst a blood vessel.

The premise is simple. On the seventieth anniversary of the National Health Service, what state is it in now? The answers, as revealed by Thomas through statistical evidence and a series of interviews with health-care workers, is not great. As he moves from office to operating theatre, Thomas finds a swathe of dedicated professionals caught in a mire of an ideology only concerned with profit.

Throughout Thomas’ urgent life and death observations, Nicolas Kent’s production manages to be righteous, moving and funny in a very necessary plea for a similar injection of humanity into those currently strangling the life out of the NHS.

Not everything is black and white in The Abode, Davey Anderson’s new play, performed with agit-prop gusto by the young ensemble from Pepperdine University, the American institution which has forged ongoing relationships with playwrights from Scotland.

Here, Anderson, director Cathy Thomas-Grant and their thirteen-strong ensemble take a discomforting peek into the appeal of extreme right wing ideology to disaffected young white men. This is seen through the eyes of Samuel, who finds a sense of belonging through an alt-right cell.

Watching such a young cast act out some of the adolescent insecurities they’re probably in the midst of squaring up to themselves is an oddly reassuring experience in a very necessary salve to the current state of fear and loathing. Anderson shows how ideas and words can be hijacked, and how those behind them are hiding in plain sight. As the cast make clear over the show’s seventy minutes, the real voice of America is here.

The Herald, August 16th 2018

ends




Labels

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

Myra Mcfadyen - An Obituary

Myra McFadyen – Actress   Born January 12th 1956; died October 18th 2024   Myra McFadyen, who has died aged 68, was an actress who brought a mercurial mix of lightness and depth to her work on stage and screen. Playwright and artistic director of the Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh, David Greig, called McFadyen “an utterly transformative, shamanic actor who could change a room and command an audience with a blink”. Citizens’ Theatre artistic director Dominic Hill described McFadyen’s portrayal of Puck in his 2019 production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre in London as “funny, mischievous and ultimately heartbreaking.”   For many, McFadyen will be most recognisable from Mamma Mia!, the smash hit musical based around ABBA songs. McFadyen spent two years on the West End in Phyllida Lloyd’s original 1999 stage production, and was in both film offshoots. Other big screen turns included Rob Roy (1995) and Our Ladies (2019), both directed by Mi...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Passage – Hip Rebel Degenerates: Black, White and Red All Over

Prelude – The Power of Three   Fear. Power. Love. This life-and-death (un)holy trinity was the driving force and raisons d’être of The Passage, the still largely unsung Manchester band sired in what we now call the post-punk era, and who between 1978 and 1983 released four albums and a handful of singles.    Led primarily by composer Dick Witts, The Passage bridged the divide between contemporary classical composition and electronic pop as much as between the personal and the political. In the oppositional hotbed of Margaret Thatcher’s first landslide, The Passage fused agit-prop and angst, and released a song called Troops Out as a single. The song offered unequivocal support for withdrawing British troops from Northern Ireland.    They wrote Anderton’s Hall, about Greater Manchester’s born again right wing police chief, James Anderton, and, on Dark Times, rubbed Brechtian polemic up against dancefloor hedonism. On XOYO, their most commercial and potentially mo...
Post a Comment
Read more