Skip to main content

What I’m Here For

Tron Theatre, Glasgow

Five stars 

 

Matters of life and death are all part of the daily grind for Flora, the overworked nurse who comes blinking into the light in this remarkable theatrical collaboration between Glasgow’s Vanishing Point company and Teater Katapult of Aarhus, Denmark on a new play by Josephine Eusebius. Arriving in Glasgow after premiering in Aarhus, Matthew Lenton’s production opens with Flora on a strip lit hospital roof, where she is catching a moment’s solitude as she recovers from the stresses of her latest shift with a rare cigarette to get her through. This noirish image is heightened by the row of performers who sit at microphones behind her, speaking stage directions as well as the assorted voices off demanding her attention. 

 

For much of the next sixty-five minutes it is only Flora, played by a tireless Lærke Schjærff Engelbrecht,  who occupies the main performing area, torn this way and that by an increasingly demanding array of patients, doctors and nurses embodied by the four other actors who step in and out of the action. Performed in English and Danish by a cast from each country and illuminated by surtitles in both languages, Lenton’s production takes the rhythmic rush of Eusebius’ text and renders the everyday mundanity of Flora’s situation as a stark and urgent ritualistic work. 

 

Pulsed along by Mark Melville’s brooding electronic underscore, despite the frenetic nature of Flora’s routine, it feels like a woozy dreamscape she has leapt into, with barely time to catch her breath, let alone have feelings or a life beyond the wards. Of course, Eusebius’ play is saying much about the resource starved state of health care now in a way that shows it as an international crisis, but this is no polemic. Rather, through a fusion of performances, Mai Katsume’s black box design, Melville’s sound and Simon Wilkinson’s ethereal lighting, it becomes a kind of sensurround meditation in which visual poetry marks out the losses in the thin air. 

 

With Engelbrech backed up on stage by Aisha Goodman, Aisha Lawal, Charlotte Trier and Mia Dinitzen, Flora becomes the pivot of an endless cycle that barely gives her chance to breathe. The end result is a slow burning tone poem full of light and shade that is as damning as it is devastating.


The Herald, April 3rd 2026

 

Ends

 

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Myra Mcfadyen - An Obituary

Myra McFadyen – Actress   Born January 12th 1956; died October 18th 2024   Myra McFadyen, who has died aged 68, was an actress who brought a mercurial mix of lightness and depth to her work on stage and screen. Playwright and artistic director of the Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh, David Greig, called McFadyen “an utterly transformative, shamanic actor who could change a room and command an audience with a blink”. Citizens’ Theatre artistic director Dominic Hill described McFadyen’s portrayal of Puck in his 2019 production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre in London as “funny, mischievous and ultimately heartbreaking.”   For many, McFadyen will be most recognisable from Mamma Mia!, the smash hit musical based around ABBA songs. McFadyen spent two years on the West End in Phyllida Lloyd’s original 1999 stage production, and was in both film offshoots. Other big screen turns included Rob Roy (1995) and Our Ladies (2019), both directed by Mi...
2 comments
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) ...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Passage – Hip Rebel Degenerates: Black, White and Red All Over

Prelude – The Power of Three   Fear. Power. Love. This life-and-death (un)holy trinity was the driving force and raisons d’être of The Passage, the still largely unsung Manchester band sired in what we now call the post-punk era, and who between 1978 and 1983 released four albums and a handful of singles.    Led primarily by composer Dick Witts, The Passage bridged the divide between contemporary classical composition and electronic pop as much as between the personal and the political. In the oppositional hotbed of Margaret Thatcher’s first landslide, The Passage fused agit-prop and angst, and released a song called Troops Out as a single. The song offered unequivocal support for withdrawing British troops from Northern Ireland.    They wrote Anderton’s Hall, about Greater Manchester’s born again right wing police chief, James Anderton, and, on Dark Times, rubbed Brechtian polemic up against dancefloor hedonism. On XOYO, their most commercial and potentially mo...
Post a Comment
Read more