Skip to main content

Six Plays Inspired by the Songs of Kate Bush

Rose Theatre, Edinburgh
Three stars

Short Attention Span Theatre has been on the go for four years now, founded by Karen Barclay and Tom Brogan to showcase compendiums of quick-fire theatrical miniatures. Presented in a lo-fi, DIY style, the company’s monthly Edinburgh nights form part of the Gilded Balloon’s Basement Theatre programme.

This latest package followed on from an earlier wheeze to present work inspired by the back catalogue of avant-pop’s other great drama queen, David Bowie. While none of the half-dozen bite-size offerings came close to Kate Bush’s own sense of the flamboyantly theatrical, the lateral-thinking chutzpah of all six writers saw them take imaginative leaps away from their source material, awash with love, anger and heavy people to the fore.  

The first of two plays called The Man With The Child in His Eyes saw Tom Murray’s doctor’s office duologue move into eye-poppingly fantastical terrain. Under Ice by John Wilde put a couple in a hotel room as their relationship turned cold. Things lightened up for Alex Cox’s take on King of the Mountain, in which a disgraced cyclist attempts to get back in the saddle by flogging used cars.

The second half opened with Carl Pickard’s all too appropriately named Wow, an acronymically inclined spy yarn that displayed a working knowledge of 1970s novelty pop hits and super-heroines’ secret identities, with a cockney Bush herself making an appearance. Ian Low’s take on The Man With The Child In His Eyes found a man taken off guard by a ten-year-old girl calling herself the Watchman, and who might just make magic happen. Finally, Houdini saw Felix O’Brien set up a séance, as suspension of disbelief conjured up much hilarity.

With directorial duties split between Barclay and Daniel Gee Husson, the company’s ensemble of Sarah C Meikle, Grant McDonald, Hayleigh Meg, Mick Cullen, Johanna Harper and Emma Findlay dovetailed their way through each play with impressive relish. Let’s just hope we’re not waiting ten years for the follow-up.

The Herald, June 13th 2019


ends
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Ron Butlin - The Sound of My Voice

When Ron Butlin saw a man who’d just asked him the time throw himself under a train on the Paris Metro, it was a turning point in how his 1987 novel, The Sound Of My Voice, would turn out. Twenty years on, Butlin’s tale of suburban family man Morris Magellan’s existential crisis and his subsequent slide into alcoholism is regarded as a lost classic. Prime material, then, for the very intimate stage adaptation which opens in the Citizens Theatre’s tiny Stalls Studio tonight. “I had this friend in London who was an alcoholic,” Butlin recalls. “He would go off to work in the civil service in the morning looking absolutely immaculate. Then at night we’d meet, and he’s get mega-blootered, then go home and continue drinking and end up in a really bad state. I remember staying over one night, and he’d emerge from his room looking immaculate again. There was this huge contrast between what was going on outside and what was going on inside.” We’re sitting in a café on Edinburgh’s south sid
Post a Comment
Read more

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) 1. THE STONE ROSES    Don’t Stop ( Silvertone   ORE   1989) The trip didn’t quite start here for what sounds like Waterfall played backwards on The Stone Roses’ era-defining eponymous debut album, but it sounds
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