Skip to main content

Build a Rocket

Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh
Four stars

Teenage dreams given the rudest of awakenings by the unwanted pregnancy of what certain tabloids used to sneeringly dismiss as a gymslip mum is a plot device laboured enough to have become cliché. If real life wasn’t so chock-a-block with such things, there would never have been any need for everyday dramadies from A Taste of Honey to Pramface and beyond.

Christopher York’s debut play for the Stephen Joseph Theatre, Scarborough took its first baby steps at last year’s Edinburgh Festival Fringe with something that took things further. All grown up now and out on tour following a stint in Adelaide, Paul Robinson’s production features a turbo-charged performance from Serena Manteghi as sixteen-year-old Yasmin, too clever for her own good despite an alcoholic mum and an errant father.

Yasmin falls for DJ Danny at the local nightclub when she should be studying. Danny has a cool flat in the poshest street in town, and Yasmin thinks it’s for life until he suddenly stops returning her calls when she tells him she’s pregnant.

So far so kitchen-sink, as Yasmin squares up to the fact that her carefree youth might be over, as well as the fact that the rent is in arrears and her best mate has taken her place with Danny. Once baby Jack arrives, however, what initially looks set to continue an increasingly downward spiral takes a leap into something more positive, as Yasmin and Jack take small steps that turn into big leaps to transcend their lot in ways we’re told aren’t allowed anymore.

Sat astride what looks like a symbolic merry-go-round by designer Helen Coyston, Manteghi’s vibrant presence can’t help but exude hope, as she seems to visibly mature from an out of her depth adolescent to a responsible parent determined to break the mould. Yes, it’s unashamedly sentimental, but York’s writing is as alive to possibilities as Yasmin is in a play that’s fired by heart, soul and pure love enough to take you to the moon and back.

The Herald, October 17th 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