Skip to main content

Low Pay? Don't Pay!


Tron Theatre, Glasgow
Four Stars

Once upon a time, it felt like Dario Fo's anti-capitalist classic was common fare on Scotland’s stages in every sense. The 1970s sex comedy styled soundtrack that opens Johnny McKnight's new take on the play might suggest a retro style revisitation, but in truth, McKnight's pop culture peppered update of Joseph Farrell's translation couldn't be more of the moment.

It's not just the everyday thrill of looting the local supermarket that makes Julie Wilson Nimmo's Toni and Sally Reid's Maggie such a vitally gallus double act in Rosalind Sydney's production for Glasgow Life in association with the Tron as part of the theatre's Mayfesto season. Nor is it the street-smart references to everyone from Ally McCoist to Judy Murray as Toni and Maggie attempt to hide their booty from their seemingly more conformist men-folk. 

For all the run-around of Toni and Maggie’s increasingly desperate measures to try and keep their born-again barricade-jumping on the down-low in the face of Itxaso Moreno’s comedy coppers, ultimately it’s the anarchic joie de vivre in standing up to power that carries the play. We might never get to see the rioting on the streets going on beyond Jessica Brettle’s living room set, but as it intermittently lights up like a quiz show, the infectiousness of collective action and its aphrodisiac thrill is clear.

Despite the fun and games of the comic interplay, both between Reid and Wilson Nimmo, and Gavin Jon Wright and Thierry Mabonga as their drippy spouses, Gio and Louis, Sydney’s take on the play is less manic than some might expect. This less cartoon-like approach works in the play’s favour, lending it a power that is sometimes over-ridden by pure knockabout. As Wilson Nimmo’s call to arms at the end of the play make clear, however, the revolutionary beast, once woken at grassroots level, is unlikely to put up with being talked down to anymore.

The Herald, May 7th 2019

ends





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

Edinburgh Rocks – The Capital's Music Scene in the 1950s and Early 1960s

Edinburgh has always been a vintage city. Yet, for youngsters growing up in the shadow of World War Two as well as a pervading air of tight-lipped Calvinism, they were dreich times indeed. The founding of the Edinburgh International Festival in 1947 and the subsequent Fringe it spawned may have livened up the city for a couple of weeks in August as long as you were fans of theatre, opera and classical music, but the pubs still shut early, and on Sundays weren't open at all. But Edinburgh too has always had a flipside beyond such official channels, and, in a twitch-hipped expression of the sort of cultural duality Robert Louis Stevenson recognised in his novel, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, a vibrant dance-hall scene grew up across the city. Audiences flocked to emporiums such as the Cavendish in Tollcross, the Eldorado in Leith, The Plaza in Morningside and, most glamorous of all due to its revolving stage, the Palais in Fountainbridge. Here the likes of Joe Loss and Ted Heath broug...
2 comments
Read more

Carla Lane – The Liver Birds, Mersey Beat and Counter Cultural Performance Poetry

Last week's sad passing of TV sit-com writer Carla Lane aged 87 marks another nail in the coffin of what many regard as a golden era of TV comedy. It was an era rooted in overly-bright living room sets where everyday plays for today were acted out in front of a live audience in a way that happens differently today. If Lane had been starting out now, chances are that the middlebrow melancholy of Butterflies, in which over four series between 1978 and 1983, Wendy Craig's suburban housewife Ria flirted with the idea of committing adultery with successful businessman Leonard, would have been filmed without a laughter track and billed as a dramady. Lane's finest half-hour highlighted a confused, quietly desperate and utterly British response to the new freedoms afforded women over the previous decade as they trickled down the class system in the most genteel of ways. This may have been drawn from Lane's own not-quite free-spirited quest for adventure as she moved through h...
Post a Comment
Read more