Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh Three stars Growing old gracefully was never on the cards for Ella, the eighty-something heroine at the centre of this sprawl through the twentieth and twenty-first centuries from the Poorboy company in co-production with Mull Theatre. By the time she's caught up in the 1944 Clydebank Blitz with her sister Irene, Ella has already found her voice in the classroom through a fondness for swearwords. Almost seven decades on, the spirit is still within her when she goes in search of her errant grandson in the bars of New York just as Hurricane Sandy is about to breeze into town. As it flashes back and forth between time-zones, introduced by each of the four cast members through a standing microphone, what emerges from Sandy Thomson's production of her own script is something akin to a female-powered state of the nation historical mini series. This is part love story, as Ella falls for older American soldier Pete. It is also a cross-generational c
An archive of arts writing by Neil Cooper. Effete No Obstacle.