Òran Mór, Glasgow
Four stars
Living forever is the only way forward in John Maley’s solo drama that forms the penultimate offering for A Play, a Pie and a Pint’s current season of lunchtime theatre. The Man at the centre of Maley’s story rocks up at the start of Lesley Hart’s production dressed as an old school vampire. Given that it is the blood of the young that keeps him and his once wrinkly contemporaries alive and kicking, this is an all too appropriate fancy dress for the brave new world he now bounds through with a boyish grin and a rejuvenated body to go with it. What follows, alas, in Maley’s expansive future fiction, is a world where age withers, however fresh the offerings.
Stevie Raine plays the Man with a Bela Lugosi cape and a rock and roll heart in Maley’s one-man opus, which in spirit is akin to the sort of speculative fiction that crept out of 1960s counter culture and added a dystopian satirical archness to its pulpy roots. The power of eternal youth and would-be revolutionaries are all in the mix alongside the bloodsucking parasites that keep our elders and betters going at the expense of the next generation. The retro future trappings are heightened by Heather Grace Currie’s wonky chessboard set on which our Man holds court with a mix of mischief and regret as the endless party in a fading Shangri-La fizzles out.
Co-presented with Northern Stage and Assembly Theatre, Hart’s production does much to take Maley’s first person fantasia off the page and give it the dramatic gravitas of some vintage mini series with as much fresh life as its subjects the Man draws his strength from. By the end, however, the Man’s elder statesman status must eventually give way to tomorrow. Let the youthquake commence.
The Herald, November 12th 2026
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