Skip to main content

In Other Words

Tron Theatre, Glasgow
Four stars

When Arthur met Jane, it was love at first calculatedly clumsy wine spillage. What happens next in Matthew Seager’s heartfelt two-hander depends on who is doing the remembering. Or rather, who is capable of remembering, as love’s first excited flush gradually turns to plague brought on by the onset of Arthur’s all-encroaching Alzheimer’s disease, which makes the couple’s once blissful domestic life so agonising. The only thing that can get them through, it seems, is the Frank Sinatra song that accidentally became the soundtrack of their lives.

With Seager himself playing Arthur and Angela Hardie as Jane, Paul Brotherston’s production for the Leeds-based Off the Middle company starts chattily enough, with the pair draping themselves across fancy chairs like a rat pack amour in waiting. As the pair flit between past, present and inevitable futures, however, each bar-room anecdote becomes increasingly less rose-tinted.

There is something oddly reminiscent of mid-period Pinter here in the play’s depiction of old times. But when Jane relates with painful matter of factness the grim but simple solution she considered in dealing with her problems, it is one of many heart-breaking moments in a show full of snapshots like this.

With an ageing population having put Alzheimer’s disease squarely on both the civic and the dramatic agenda some years back, Seager’s take on things is shot through with intimacy and warmth. These would be enough by themselves to evoke a state of everyday tragedy we will all have to square up to in some form at some point. 

It is an over-riding playfulness that is laced through the first half of the play’s seventy-five minutes, however, that lends things as surprising lightness. As Seager and Hardie capture the full youthful glory of all those golden moments that define Arthur and Jane, only to have them robbed from under them, their life-long love affair becomes a still cherished if unreliable memoir.

The Herald, March 7th 2019

ends



Comments

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) ...

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...

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...