Skip to main content

Bus Regulation: The Musical (Strathclyde)

Platform, Easterhouse 

Four stars


Once upon a time, the idea of running a regular bus service to some of Glasgow’s outlying areas might have seemed a fanciful notion. These days, while things have changed enough so it is possible to take a trip to see Ellie Harrison’s glorious piece of agit-prop theatre, it has been something of a bumpy ride getting here.

 

Bus Regulation: The Musical (Strathclyde) cops its moves from Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Starlight Express to whizz through more than half a century of civic calamities on the road to the mess of bus privatisation that exists today. This is done largely through the narration of Nellie the Clippie. Played with effervescent brio by Katie Thomson, Nellie steers us through the rocky road from municipal ownership of buses to the deregulation that ushered in the mess of privatisation that exists today. This is illustrated by an eight-piece ensemble of skaters drawn from three local roller derby clubs; Glasgow Roller Derby, Mean City Roller Derby, and Sugar & Spin Skate Crew.

 

The result is a fun and informative half hour that lays bare the roots of the ongoing absurdities of a systemhijacked to benefit company shareholders rather than the tax paying citizens who paid for them. Those responsible are booed like pantomime villains as Nellie names the guilty, while the skaters don various coloured capes and logos to mark the changes.

 

Originally presented in Manchester in 2019, Harrison has adapted the show for Glasgow with the aid of the Get Glasgow Moving campaign for better public transport in the city. While there are sadly no songs to flesh things out, this fact-filled extravaganza manages to both entertain and enlighten in a way that highlights how public services are being asset stripped in plain sight. This makes for a vitally of the moment piece of serious fun that is well worth the fare. 


The Herald, January 30th 2023

 

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