The Arches, Glasgow 3 stars To get over the things you fear, you first have to confront them. Whether novelist Alan Bissett is scared of spiders or not isn’t on record, but he certainly gets stuck in to the little blighters in this arachnid-friendly solo effort first performed by himself during the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. From the hoodie-sporting common or garden variety who comes on like some wannabe chancer straight out of an Irvine Welsh story, to the black-booted southern belle Black Widow with predatory intentions, Bissett’s sextet of comic thumbnail sketches are life studies akin to biology lab dissections with extra added amateur psychology thrown in. Bissett’s subjects are being held captive under glass in a St Andrews research centre, where the female of the species rules the roost. The pecking order elsewhere is made clear by the presence of a swarthy Latino tarantula and the neurotic New Yorker who embodies the recluse spider. As well observed as all th
An archive of arts writing by Neil Cooper. Effete No Obstacle.