Skip to main content

Vulcan 7

King’s Theatre, Edinburgh 
Three stars

An actor’s life can go in many ways. Adrian Edmondson and Nigel Planer’s co-written vehicle for themselves makes this abundantly clear in their portrayal of a couple of old luvs who left Rada at the same time and end up reluctantly reunited in Iceland on the set of the latest instalment of the hokey sci-fi franchise that gives the play its title.

The difference is that where Planer’s Hugh Delavois is a cast regular and impeccably bland example of a very English form of thespian, Edmondson’s Gary Savage is a hard-drinking loose cannon who once flew high with the Hollywood bad boys. Now, alas, Savage has crashed back down to earth with a bump and a one-line bit-part as an unlikely alien monster with an outfit that makes 1970s Dr Who appear sophisticated.

Out of this comes a bittersweet comedy of late-life ennui among the creative classes seen through a trailer darkly even as things take a real-life seismic turn that puts both men on the edge in every way. With Lois Chimimba’s film set runner Leela a put-upon foil, Edmondson and Planer’s odd couple are revealed as two sides of the same coin who over-compensate like crazy in their desperation for everyday happiness.

Steve Marmion’s touring production that began life at the Yvonne Arnaud Theatre in Guildford uses an appropriately apocalyptic-sounding Bjork soundtrack to usher us into designer Simon Higlett’s increasingly off-kilter trailer which forms the play’s sole setting. With this in place, Hugh and Gary’s co-dependent sparring is a classic Brit-com set-up. If a running gag about Daniel Day-Lewis doesn’t quite scale the dizzy heights of hilarity in the play’s take on artifice, identity and existential dread, for those who came of age watching Edmondson and Planer as 1980s student union anarchists might stumble on a few home truths that remain troublingly familiar.

The Herald, November 6th 2018

ends



Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Art School Dance Goes On Forever – Snapshots Of Masters Of The Multiverse

Intro – Snapshots – Deaf School

1

In 1980, the same year as the Manchester band, Magazine, released a 7
inch single called A Song From Under The Floorboards – a three verse
and chorus distillation of Dostoyevsky's novel, Notes From Underground
– an art school scandal occurred.

This scandal took place in Liverpool, and was based around a project
called the Furbelows, although it became better known in the Liverpool
Echo and other organs that reported it as the Woolly Nudes.

The Furbelows, or Woolly Nudes, were a group of artists who had come
out of Liverpool College of Art, who, dressed in grotesque woolly
costumes which featured knitted approximations of male and female
genitalia, made assorted public interventions around the city centre as
kind of living sculptures acting out assorted narratives.

The Furbelows project had been funded by what was then Merseyside Arts
Association, and, after the participants were arrested and taken to
court on obscenity charges after what…
Post a Comment
Read more

Peter Brook – The Prisoner

Peter Brook is no stranger to Scotland, ever since the guru of European and world theatre first brought his nine-hour epic, The Mahabharata, to Glasgow in 1988. That was at the city’s old transport museum, which by 1990 had become Tramway, the still-functioning permanent venue that opened up Glasgow and Scotland as a major channel for international theatre in a way that had previously only been on offer at Edinburgh International Festival.
Brook and his Paris-based Theatre des Bouffes du Nord company’s relationship with Tramway saw him bring his productions of La Tragedie de Carmen, La Tempete, Pellease et Mellisande, The Man Who…, and Oh Les Beaux Jours – the French version of Samuel Beckett’s Happy Days – to Glasgow.
Thirty years on from The Mahabharata, Brook comes to EIF with another piece of pan-global theatre as part of a residency by Theatre des Bouffes du Nord, which Brook has led since he decamped to Paris from London in the early 1970s. The current Edinburgh residency has alr…
Post a Comment
Read more

Martin McCormick – Ma, Pa and the Little Mouths

Family life is everything to Martin McCormick. The actor turned writer is having an increasingly high profile as a playwright, with his biggest play to date, Ma, Pa and the Little Mouths, opening this week at the Tron Theatre in Glasgow in a production in association with the National Theatre of Scotland as part of the Tron’s Mayfesto season. While his own domestic life with his wife, actress Kirsty Stuart, who is currently appearing in Frances Poet’s play, Gut, at the Traverse in Edinburgh, and their two children, sounds a hectic whirl of of juggling schedules, it is nothing like the world he has created for his play.
“I always knew it was going to be about two older people who’d experienced some kind of trauma and grief,” says McCormick, “but whatever it is that they’ve been through, it’s all in the background. They’re suppressing it, and there’s all this claustrophobia caused by all these suppressed emotions they’re going through while being stuck in this room. I guess all that came…
Post a Comment
Read more