In the experience of sense, the question arises what happens when we dead awaken? There is; however, another question: what happens when awakening, it goes unnoticed? Lost Lear is a lament to the creeping grief witnessed by most families: dementia.
Read MoreJust before the play commences, two figures emerge to unfold a massive brown tarpaulin across the stage. A couple of buckets are strategically placed and stage left there is a large chain sling connected to a commensurately sized hook. Fitting for a large industrial farm. Yet it looms menacingly. As the lights go up, they do so only insofar as to give off a brown industrial hue. The type that predictably drains all other colour from industrial sheds. All of this, of course, is the portent of things to come.
Read MoreA man sits on a bare stage. He is preceded by a white bench…and however many days it has taken to reach this moment. As he contemplates existence, the audience contemplates him. This is how Ascension starts. The man, Dutch sailor Leendert Hasenbosch (Dan Hazelwood), has been exiled on an island as punishment for sodomy. The year is 1725. Probably. Hard to say for Ascension is uninhabited. What is certain is Leendert is dying. But he doesn’t want us to dwell on that right now. He’d first prefer for us to consider his story.
Read MoreParodying people such as Elon Musk is not a trivial task. He already seems like a cartoon. Musk says and does ridiculous things in real life. Leaning yet more in that direction demands plutonium grade material so as not to replicate the version who frequently appears in the news. Elon Musk: Lost In Space is pencil lead grade.
Read MoreI know so little of Marlene Dietrich’s life that a mere trace of information would register as a new classification in my knowledge base. So, to come away with a rounded sense of Dietrich’s life during the war years in the space of an hour is a massive tribute to the talents of writer Tjaša Ferme.
Read MorePhysical transformation might be the ultimate in ‘show, don’t tell’. The power of speech is replaced with the universality of body language. The transition between the inner and outer self is dialogically framed to arrive at a shared understanding with the audience. This is powerfully projected by writer and performer Edu Díaz as he transforms from an everyday bloke into the queen of the carnival.
Read MoreTheatre 118 has got off to a flying start with their Play of The Week series which has delivered a new production for each week of July. It is a testament to their talent, ideas and utter dedication that they have pulled this off in so short a time without an iota of a hitch. In so doing, they have managed to create a community, a buzz, in an unused office block, just off Glassford Street.
Read MoreThe view from a bridge catches people in different ways. For some it is a salve for that which has come before. For others it offers the promise of a way out. For all it is a displacement activity: some place other than here, now. Kieran Lee-Hamilton’s play explores both strands from near opposite ends of the age spectrum…
Read MoreThe first to disappear in any murder story is the person who has suffered fatal harm. They are reduced to an ethnically defined, gendered, life-styled archetype with a number pertaining to their age stamped on their forehead. Oh, and they are always warm, generous and friendly. To a fault. Which is perhaps the fault that finally denudes them of any real personality and renders them unseen. Woe betide anyone that says “Aye Jim, could be a carnaptious so-and so from time to time” or “Jacky could be obstreperous when the mood took her”. It would add colour to those perfect bones…adding flawed human flesh.
Read MoreIt’s an unenviable task bringing together two lives which shared no earthly bond. And contrivances to achieve such ends rarely convince. But every now and then a performance breaks loose from the threads of the inevitable and becomes something else. The Badly Behaved Poets Society takes two erstwhile non-contiguous lives and skilfully synthesises the coordinates of coexistence. The result is a play which more than convinces, it enthrals.
Read MoreA year ago tonight, Dance The Colour Blue played to its last audience. My first professionally produced play was an entirely unexpected affair…as well as something of a revelatory experience!
Read MoreBody shaming is such an ever present feature of modern day society it’s surprising that it retains any remnants of power to surprise yet further…and then you discover, as a man, the extent to which 51% of society are shamed: women.
The Vagina Monologues has been a presence in theatres ever since creator V’s (formerly Eve Ensler) performance off-Broadway in 1996. 27 years later it is still finding new audiences - this one in Dundee - and still has the power to shock.
27 years later it is still finding new audiences - this one in Dundee - and still has the power to shock.
Read MoreThe rotating stage at Manchester’s Royal Exchange Theatre moves to the slow rhythmic climes of the Deep South. Maggie, played by Ntombizodwa Ndlovu, enters like she owns the place - and for the first half hour, she does. Regaling Brick (Bayo Gbadamosi) with her half-formed thoughts and remnants of gossip. Gossip, it so transpires, with which she has more than a passing relationship. Her partner, Brick, has little room for manoeuvre figuratively or literally (having recently broken his leg) and can do little but to lie around on bed and listen. It is better than risking the alternative
Read MoreTime appears sometimes to sit on two different planes, connected orthogonally to one another. On one, it travels so fast so as to seem wired to the energy meter. On the other, sloth-like: easy to forget we were in lockdown at the start of the year.
Every year, I try to make the most of January and February: the sleeper months where the world feels like a town called ‘Sunday’. Prepare then, and you are able to bolt from the hatches in March. By the end of February, I had completed two read-throughs of two new plays. By March, I was once again editing when I decided to do something I had not done before: apply for funding to put on a play.
Read MoreAnarchic talent, stuffy TV execs, pleading intermediaries,Spike trods the well-worn turbulent path of unchecked ambition brought before an establishment clique who like to tell their charges ‘the war is over’ whilst simultaneously not having noticed the world has moved on. The set up to the play is readily familiar - a little known but talented man, surrounded by bigger names - AKA The Goons - has ideas his superiors think are above his station and nigh impossible to execute with any measure of success. What ensues is the classic ebb and flow of advance, retreat and entrenchment. A handy juxtaposition, as it happens, to Milligan’s time in the war where the intransigence of his erstwhile military high command perfectly mirrors his experience within the light entertainment department at the BBC. Robert Wilfort effortlessly captures the garrulous energy of Spike Milligan; refusing to buckle before the lethargic behemoth. He corrals his better-paid peers Peter Sellers (Patrick Warner) and Harry Secombe (Jeremy Lloyd) to contribute towards a vehicle of explosive post-dadaist humour. Much to the chagrin of his BBC betters.
Read MoreIf suddenly you found yourself involved in immersive theatre, which play might you choose? The Cherry Orchard? Into The Woods? You’d probably avoid Medea and steer well clear of Titus Andronicus. You might also want to put Trainspotting Live into the latter group. That is not a reflection on the sheer dynamic tour-de-force of the production. Just, if you’ve read the book…
Read MoreBe careful what you wish for: a scarecrow so successful in their endeavour…may scare the birds away forever…yet rue the reverb of redundancy. Perhaps not their doing. Who knows? Certainly not the scarecrows.
Read MoreCrocodile Rock, by Andy McGregor, is the story of a teenager who, uncomfortable in his own skin, escapes to a world where he can breathe more comfortably and be more himself. We first meet Steven in his bedroom, Millport - population: 1500. His life seems all but mapped out by his father who wants nothing more than for his son to learn the tricks of the trade at the Pier Inn. Steven lacks the confidence and communication skills to banter freely with the regulars…an awkwardness stemming from somewhere deeper within. Running a guest-house, his mother is constantly busy cooking meals and cleaning, so Steven mucks in at ‘reception’ from time to time. During one such occasion, he checks in a guest like no other: exotic and disturbingly exquisite in his eyes. And so the world of drag lays bare its charms and dreams and possibilities, and also a route out from the claustrophobic confines of Millport. A route littered with pitfalls and danger around its glossy edges.
Read MoreThere is always a tendency in my writing to give agency to those who seemingly have none. My play Dance The Colour Blue is about loss: of companionship, of love, of identity. What does it mean to be so absorbed by another that you can become as easily subsumed as the air that they breathe? You become a void: a repository into which any hint of a notion or scintilla of an idea can be tossed. All of it equally able to stick. Not a single joule of resistive energy anywhere to be found. Literature is littered with such examples - and they are overwhelmingly women. Take Shakespeare’s Cordelia in King Lear, or Ophelia in Hamlet, or so many supporting females in contemporary dramas able be replaced by a ‘sexy lamp’ without impacting the narrative. Or Penelope in Homer’s The Odyssey. Often seen as enigmatic, Penelope is the centre of the mythological strand of Dance The Colour Blue,
Read MoreRabbie Burns often feels like an elusive character - sinusoidally ephemeral, not with respect to content, but in prominence. You think you’ll get a better sense of him next time around. But if the last decade is anything to go by, turning up the frequency merely turns up the translucency but at the expense of ambiguity. Despite multiple versions of this man, the more you try to delineate the one and true Burns, the more frustratingly opaque he becomes.
Burn by Alan Cumming is a one-man tour-de-force; a packet of energy to burn the surface of the facade in the hope of laying bare the man below. Whether it succeeds depends entirely on the knowledge and relationship you have with Burns as you take your seat.
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