City Park, Glasgow
Four stars
A clinical office block
housed inside an old tobacco factory is the perfect venue for this suite of
three plays exploring the dehumanising effects of technology brought together
by director Cora Bissett for the National Theatre of Scotland. When such worlds
collide within each play - one full of life and character, the other cold and
soulless - we get to the beating heart of what matters beyond Garry Boyle’s
largely electronic sound design that pulses proceedings.
In Darklands, Morna
Pearson positions gloriously potty-mouthed Doric couple Brie and Logan inside a
glass box trying for a baby under the scrutiny of a disembodied voice playing
God. Metaverse finds Hannah Khalil’s mother and daughter attempting to keep
their umbilical connection alive by communicating through virtual reality.
Finally, Glowstick is Vlad Butucea’s tender study of a wheelchair-bound older
woman called River her carer, an android called Ida, and the liberation they
offer each other.
Seen across two stages
created by Jen McGinley’s retro-future minimalist design, the three plays are
connected conceptually as they expose glitches in a system controlled by the
all-pervading presence of a body known only as The Company. This treats the
everyday mess of flesh and blood relationships as homogenous commodities having
the life sucked out of them. Such sci-fi tropes of social engineering may be
familiar, but in the current climate they are full of heart and soul in a
collective plea for humanity.
With Simon Wilkinson’s
by turns stark and celestial lighting working alongside Gail Sneddon’s video
design, the four actors are freed up to have some fun amidst the show’s serious
points. Shyvonne Ahmmad and Nicholas Ralph are both ferociously comic and
touchingly poignant as Pearson’s couple, with Ahmmad also playing the daughter
opposite Maureen Beattie as her mother and Moyo Akande as an apparent fellow
traveller in Khalil’s play. Finally, Beattie as River and Akande as Ida transcend
the bounds of bad-tech as Butucea lays bare the power of the imagination that
liberated us from being cogs in the machine to connect us all.
The Herald, March 20th 2019
Ends
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