Coffee-Table Notes

Perth Theatre Four stars Charlie Chaplin was a godsend for some of the wounded during the First World War, which opened hostilities the same year Chaplin first appeared onscreen. Such serendipity is brought beguilingly home in this fifteen-minute dramatic installation presented by the Sound and Fury company, which tours to Perth this week to coincide with the National Theatre of Scotland and Perth Theatre’s First World War inspired production of The 306: Dusk. Both are commissioned by 14-18 Now, the body set up to enable living memorials to the war through various artworks. With theatre producers Fuel also on board for Sound and Fury’s contribution, Charlie Ward plays to audiences of ten, who embody different versions of Harry, a patient in a wartime hospital ward. Watching and listening astride a bed, we bear witness to snatches of one of Chaplin’s early films, set on a beach and beamed here onto the ceiling. As the makeshift screen fades and Harry falls into a delirious drea

A lot has happened since Two Destination Language first toured an early version of Manpower in 2015. It was the day the result of the Brexit referendum came in when the international performance company’s core duo of Alister Lownie and Katherina Radeva decided to take stock of a show which had originally been about gender and what might now be dubbed toxic masculinity. “We knew we had to re-write it,” says Radeva, the Bulgarian artist who formed Two Destination Language with Lownie in 2010. “We were in Portugal making another show, and we knew we were touring Manpower, and then when the result of Brexit came in, it seemed connected somehow.” By a quirk of scheduling, the opening night of Lownie and Radeva’s revised take on Manpower happened to fall in January 2017 on the day after Donald Trump was elected as 45 th president of the United States. Again, while this was an accident of timing, the resonances of Two Destination Language’s show couldn’t have been more current.

Sylvia Dow says she’s categorically not a hoarder. Muriel Romanes disagrees. She’s seen the outhouse where Dow keeps her things. Romanes herself happily admits to being a hoarder. She still has her mother’s coat and her father’s gowns from his university days. Whatever the pair do or don’t have in storage, both of their experiences should filter into Stuff, Dow’s new play directed by Romanes. The play looks at a woman called Magda’s coming to terms with the physical totems of lifelong memories she’s carried around with her as she waits for the local council to take it away. “I saw a poster with the word ‘mess’ on it,” Dow explains of the roots of the play, “and I started to think about hoarders, and what how being a hoarder might affect their lives. The play that came out is really about the relationship between a mother and daughter, but seen through the prism of being a hoarder. I’m not a hoarder, though everyone says I am, but a real hoarder is someone who has a hoarding disord