Arts at Loaningdale, Biggar
Four stars
Hollywood is a long way from rural 1920s Clydesdale in Martin Travers’ new play for the Braw Clan company, set up in 2023 to produce plays in Scots. In a cramped cottage, teenage Nancy’s fantasies of becoming a star of the big screen like her silent movie idols beamed into the local picturehouse are all she has to escape the everyday drudgery she looks set to be stuck with forever.
With her mother Annie out at church and her bedbound granny wheezing her way to oblivion in the other room, Nancy is free to sing, dance, put on lipstick and cut her hair, with only the mirror on the wall for an audience. Only a mountain of dirty laundry is holding her back from making the big time. Five years on, and a prodigal’s return in the wake of the talkies sees Nancy’s sister Wee Moon harbour her own dreams of fame as history looks set to repeat itself.
There is something Tennessee Williams-like about Travers’ heroines in Rosalind Sydney’s production, brought to life by a trio of fine actresses. Chiara Sparkes’ Nancy is a Clydesdale Blanche DuBois before her time, whose dreams turn sour and leave her broken. Helen McAlpine’s Annie is trapped by her own anger, and Morven Blackadder’s Wee Moon is a wide-eyed innocent about to step out into the big bad world.
Travers’ play says much about the ambitions of bright young working class women, only for them to be brutalised by forces beyond their control. It says much too about how pop culture came to be dominated by the hip-talking Americanisms that Nancy has affected in place of her own speech patterns.
Sydney’s production is played out on Jessica Brettle’s living room set flanked by washing lines, and pulsed by Pippa Murphy’s elegiac score. Both Murphy's soundscape and the presence of footlights are impressionistic pointers to the occasional leaps into fantasy signified by Paul Rodger’s lighting. Like the would be screen queens at its centre, this is a play that reaches for the stars.
The Herald, September 23rd 2024
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