Joyce McMillan goes online…

For the first time, all my writing on theatre and general social/political issues will be available online here.

Most of these pieces are commissioned by, and first appear in, The Scotsman. Ultimate ownership of copyright remains with me, and is asserted here.

Everything on the site appears in date order, below, beginning with the most recent column or review.

If you want to search the site for something specific, type your keyword(s) into the “search” space on the right, and press return.

To come back to this main page at any time, just click on “joyce mcmillan – online” at the very top of the page. Enjoy!

joycemcmillan.co.uk

© Joyce McMillan 2009

Ten Years Of Devolution, And The Strange Death Of Scottish Republicanism – Column 4.7.09

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JOYCE MCMILLAN for The Scotsman 4.7.09
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ON A STRANGE AND SWELTERING July day in Edinburgh, an 83-year-old monarch with a heavy cold drives a few yards up the street from her palace at Holyrood to deliver a tenth birthday greeting to the Scottish Parliament.  Almost 50 of Scotland’s 129 MSP’s are not present to hear her brief speech; their absence causes some adverse comment, and talk of discourtesy to a Queen who, ever since 1999, has gone out of her way to uphold the dignity of the Parliament as part of Britain’s new constitutional settlement.

Given that this is a deliberately low-key celebration, though, perhaps the subdued turnout is not too surprising; and it certainly does not signal a surge in anti-royalist sentiment among MSP’s.  For what is most surprising about the relationship between Scotland and the monarchy, as it has evolved over the last decade, is the strange death of republican Scotland; and of that vigorous strand of anti-monarchism that once seemed likely to become dominant in Scottish politics, under home rule.   There are still a few staunch republicans around in Scottish public life, of course, notably “Red” Roseanna Cunningham, currently environment minister in the Scottish Government.  But these days, they tend to focus their energy on more urgent issues; and to keep their republican sentiments largely to themselves.

The first and most obvious reason for this change of mood has been the decision of the current SNP leadership to accept that even following independence, the Queen and her successors – used to reigning over many independent nations, including Canada and Australia – could easily continue to act as heads of state in Scotland, as a symbol of the continuing “social union” with the rest of the UK.  There is a vague promise of a referendum on the monarchy, following full independence.  But to judge by the affectionate smile that wreathes the First Minister’s face whenever he sets eyes on the monarch, getting rid of the monarchy will be the last thing on his mind, should independence ever come; indeed he seems to have come to see good relations with the crown as an asset, in making sure that Scots see independence as a goal that can be achieved within a framework of general stability and goodwill.

But if this shifting attitude in the SNP has helped to take republicanism off the mainstream political agenda, it’s clear that this political mood-change would have been much less likely if the House of Windsor itself had not played a blinder of a game, in keeping abreast of the politics of devolution.  Back in 1952-3, when the present Queen first ascended the throne, she made a couple of famous mistakes in relation to Scotland, still resented in nationalist circles; not least her decision to call herself Queen Elizabeth II, although only England had ever had a Queen Elizabeth before.

This time around, though, the Palace seems to have resolved to get things right, grasping from the outset, unlike most other British institutions, that unless the monarchy showed full respect for the Parliament as a new element in the constitution – and for its possible future decisions on independence – then it would risk making itself the enemy of progress in Scotland, and greatly increase its chance of rejection.  When Alex Salmond was elected First Minister in 2007, the Queen therefore made a point of travelling to Edinburgh for the swearing-in ceremony; vote for independence if you like, she seemed to be saying, but don’t assume that that means the end of me, as your Queen of Scots.

And so far, the Windsor strategy seems to be working well; not least because events in the wider world are also now  playing in its favour.   For if the recent financial meltdown has made one thing ever more clear, it’s that when it comes to unaccountable power in the modern state, the monarch is the least of our problems.  Constrained by tight constitutional rules, subject from birth to intense media scrutiny, forced decades ago to open their books to public inspection, and driven – at least under the present Queen – by an obvious ethos of dedicated public service, the royals begin to look like model public figures and wealth-holders compared with the cash-grubbing wide-boys of the financial sector, whose largely unpunished billion-dollar antics are now casting millions of blameless workers into the misery of long-term unemployment.

Which is another reason why, as the game of constitutional politics plays itself out over the next decade, the Scots are far more likely to stick with the House of Windsor, than to vote it into the dustbin of history.  Scotland is, of course,  more Nordic and pragmatic in its attitude to monarchy than the rest of the UK.  It sees the monarch as a useful and dignified figure contained within the limits a democratic constitution, not as some magical bearer of the essence of the nation, hedged about with a Shakespearean glow of divinity; and if the mood on Wednesday was relatively muted, and confined to a dry nod of national acknolwedgment, it’s precisely because the occasion bears no magical significance.

But if some Westminster commentators still seem unable to grasp that distinction, the House of Windsor itself has been quick to understand he subtly different nature of the game north of the Border, since the Parliament emerged to give it full expression.  For good or ill, the Scottish Parliament is now in with the constitutional bricks.  And whatever the political outcome, it looks as though the House of Windsor will also be there for the foreseeable future, just across the road at Holyrood; to hold the ring through whatever changes may come, and to continue to play their leading role in the theatre of national life, with all the skill of a team of infinitely experienced performers, under the eye of a wise, and increasingly subtle, director.

ENDS ENDS

New Works New Worlds

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JOYCE MCMILLAN on NEW WORKS, NEW WORLDS at the Arches, Glasgow, for The Scotsman 4.7.09
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Hitch/Miasma  4 stars ****
The Sustainability of Sweetness  4 stars ****
The YelloWing  3 stars ****
A Woman In Berlin   3 stars ***
The Line We Draw   4 stars ****
Plane Food Cafe   3 stars ***

THE ARCHES is a chameleon venue, sometimes club, sometimes gallery, sometimes complex of theatres or rehearsal spaces; but this week, it feels like an intense creative laboratory, as the Arches new July festival spreads through the underground spaces.  The idea is for a group of  perhaps twenty young artists – performers, writers, visual artists – to get to grips with the strange new world in which we find ourselves, in the summer of 2009; so we begin with a pair of sharply topical installations, by Kieran Hurley and Lindsay Perth, that grasp the anxieties and angers of the moment with an almost painful vividness.

Hurley’s Hitch, in a room arranged like a darkened museum, is the beginning of a documentation of his current low-budget journey to L’Aquila in Italy, the earthquake-shaken town chosen by Silvio Berlusconi as the scene of this month’s G8 summit meeting; the tone is hesitant, but the political gesture of Hurley’s journey is both powerful and poignant.  And Perth’s Miasma is a brilliant short video installation which takes two great disaster movies of the 1970’s – Towering Inferno and The Poseidon Adventure – and shows dramatically similar scenes from each on facing screens, forcing a repeated, looping confrontation with the nightmares of disaster by heat and flood that now haunt our dreams.

Then it’s on to a series of  disturbing one-woman shows about a once-patriarchal cultulre in crisis.  There’s Naomi Shoba’s fierce, chocolate-stained meditation – inspired by Barack Obama’s inaugural address – on the moral sustainability of the American way of life, complete with bold and tragic images of sexual degradation and obesity.  There’s Jaulia Taudevin’s new take on Charlotte Perkins Gillman’s feminist classic The Yellow Wallpaper, with astonishing flights of contorted movement, and flickering shadow images.

There’s A Woman In Berlin, a conventional  monologue for a woman forced – like most of the female population – to trade her body for survival, in the weeks after the Red army arrive in Berlin in 1945; writer Iain McClure and director Deborah Neville identify a brilliant subject, but need a more adventurous form to express its full, disruptive weight.   And there’s Skye Loneragan’s strange, fascinating verse monologue about the uneasy borderline between adult stories and children’s stories, the adult and the childlike, delivered with terrific, charismatic poise, and accompanied by live sketches from artist Jenny Soep.

After all that, Richard DeDomenici’s Plane Food Cafe – an environmentally friendly chance to enjoy airline food here on the ground, courtesy of a tiny airline cabin manned by himself and satirical stewardess Patricia Kavanagh – seems a shade too jokey to make us think much about the ethics of air travel.   But in a Festival where every single show – including several more, this weekend – is a work in progress, there’s plenty of room for further development; and for a few laughs, too, in the face of grim and scary times.

ENDS ENDS

The Taming Of The Shrew, Good Things, Thriller Live!

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JOYCE MCMILLAN on THE TAMING OF THE SHREW at the Botanic Gardens, Glasgow, GOOD THINGS at Pitlochry Festival Theatre, and THRILLER LIVE! at the King’s Theatre, Glasgow, for Scotsman Arts, 2.7.09
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The Taming Of The Shrew  3 stars ***
Good Things   3 stars ***
Thriller Live!   4 stars ****

WHAT IS IT about Shakespeare’s Taming Of The Shrew?  On one hand, it’s a robust plea for old-fashioned patriarchal marriage – the man the head of the woman, and happiness through female submission to a touch of domestic violence – that should be wholly unacceptable to modern audiences.  Yet on the other hand, the tale of shrewish Kate of Padua, and her wife-taming sparring-partner Petruchio, seems strangely unwilling to lie down and die.   Time and again, actors and directors return to it; and time and again, they seem to make it work for modern audiences, despite the odd whoop and gasp of disapproval.

Gordon Barr’s new outdoor version of the play for the 2009 Bard In The Botanics season in Glasgow is a messy but exciting case in point, a show that embraces a series of high-risk decisions in the effort to find new dimensions in Shakespeare’s text, and somehow manages to generate an interpretation that’s both funny and thought-provoking.  His first bold decision is to ignore the text’s references to Kate’s beauty, and to cast her as a butch-looking fattie in Viz magazine mode, stomping round the house in cropped hair and trainers while her girlie sister Bianca swoons over copies of Brides magazine.  Jennifer Dick, as Kate, is wonderful actress who speaks Shakespeare like a dream, but there’s no denying that Petruchio’s willlingess to marry her smashes a few contemporary body myths before the play is 15 minutes old.

Then there’s the parallel decision to play Grant O’Rourke’s Petruchio as a serial drunk, a slightly crazed ageing bachelor who enjoys a joke, isn’t much bothered about women, and doesn’t mind if his wife looks like the back of a bus so long as he can get hold of her inheritance.  At a stroke, these twin decisions remove the element of sexual titillation involved, for some, in seeing a handsome bloke torture and break a pretty, spirited woman; but it also serves to make the strange arc of the play’s argument stand out more starkly, as this clearly capable Kate swerves from dogged spinsterhood into wifely subservience.

And what emerges with great clarity – through two strong central performances, with sharp support from Beth Marshall as Kate’s glamorous parent Baptista, and Amie Burns Walker as the vacuous Bianca – is the extent to which this play understands the whole business of marriage and human relationship as a kind of performance.  In the end, socially and sexually, it suits both Kate and Petruchio for her to perform the role of submission, like a good actress brilliantly trained to convey a truth without totally surrendering to it, while he plays the amusing role of socially eccentric drunkard.  And despite some cringe-making coarse-Shakespeare performances further down the cast, Barr’s production unleashes whole flights of thought about the sexual and social roles people choose to play, inside marriage and out of it; and how they never – as Kate’s final nod to the audience suggests – tell the whole truth about anything.

There are no such subtleties, alas, up at Pitlochry, where one of the opening shows in this year’s all-Scottish Homecoming season is an uninspired re-run by Ken Alexander of Liz Lochhead’s recent romantic comedy, Good Things.  Set in a charity shop in middle-class Glasgow, Good Things is an ingeniously economical show, in which four actors contrive – with the help of some silly wigs and costumes – to play a cast of about fifteen characters, including our heroine Susan, a nice volunteer of 50 or so whose husband has just dumped her for a younger model.

In the course of hectic year, we see Susan strengthen her friendship with her camp colleague Frazer, survive survive embarrassing encounters with both her ex and his new partner, and – rather implausibly – find new love with a handsome widower from across the road.  The problem, though, is that this is a play that relies on sharp verbal wit to cut through and balance the cheesy romance of its storyline; and Ken Alexander’s soft-edged production never even begins to develop the kind of pace and timing that would really display the more blackly humorous  dimension of the play.  Carol Ann Crawford is lovely and likable as Susan.  But from the moment she enters, looking implausibly dowdy in a hair-slide, there’s a sinking feeling that this production is going to be dogged by a preference for cheap, obvious stereotypes over sharp observation; and although there’s plenty to enjoy in a show that unashamedly wears its middle-aged heart on its sleeve, there’s a constant, tantalising feeling of points missed, and depths of humour never plumbed.

If these two shows both struggle to find the right point of contact with their audience though, there’s no such problem for that modern stage phenomenon, the live tribute show, which goes straight to the heart of its chosen audience by simply piggy-backing on some huge global phenomenon of popular culture.  By strange chance, the sad death of Michael Jackson, last week, coincided with the arrival in Glasgow of the UK touring show Triller Live!, designed to showcase almost 30 of his greatest hits on stage.   Thriller Live! is a slightly strange show, an odd mixture of Jackson tribute and Pop Idol showcase.   But the songs are great, the dancing slick, the singing often fine; and although tickets are now hard to come by, those who make it to the King’s this weekend will find that Thriller Live! hits exactly the right spot, by dwelling not on the life that ended so sadly last week, but on the music that makes it worth remembering.

The Taming Of The Shrew at the Botanic Gardens, Glasgow, until 11 July.  Good Things in repertoire at Pitlochry Festival Theatre until 17 October.   Thriller Live! at the King’s Theatre, Glasgow, until 4 July.  A version of this review of Thriller Live! appeared in some editions of The Scotsman on Tuesday.

ENDS ENDS

Thriller Live!

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JOYCE MCMILLAN on THRILLER at the King’s Theatre, Glasgow, for The Scotsman 30.6.09
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MICHAEL JACKSON’S sudden death, five days ago, may have sent a tidal wave of grief, nostalgia, speculation and innuendo sweeping through the world’s media.  But there was absolutely no sign of hysteria at the King’s Theatre in Glasgow last night, when – by pure chance – the touring Michael Jackson tribute show, Thriller Live!, arrived in the city for a six-day run.

Instead, there was a full house of quiet, prosperous-looking theatregoers  in early middle age, waiting patiently for a reconstructed glimpse of the music, the moves, the style, that make Michael Jackson worth remembering.  Above all, they were waiting for the great global hits – from I Want You Back at the very beginning of it all, to Thriller at the end – that would finally give them permission to get to their feet, to scream and shout a bit, and to start getting down as only a Glasgow audience can, when a bit of soul comes their way.

So it’s good to report that this well-tried touring show – directed in the UK by Gary Lloyd, from an original idea by Adrian Grant – did not disappoint them, but absolutely fulfilled their need to see Jackson’s life and music celebrated, with plenty of resepct, and very little sentimentality.  The show uses some slightly unexpected strategies, in leading its audience through a more-or-less chronological series of around 30 of Jackson’s greatest hits.   It supplies some light biographical narrative, but generally lets the songs speak for themselves, and never takes the story beyond the early 1990’s.   And it never assigns any one performer to “play” Jackson, either as a child or as an adult; instead, a cast of seven lead vocalists including blonde Pop Idol graduate Hayley Evetts – backed by a team of nine fine dancers – share the songs.

In the end, though, this slightly oblique approach to the challenge of recreating Jackson’s enigmatic stage personality seems in some ways more effective than a straightforward attempt at impersonation; and the first half of the show does a fine, lucid job of tracing Jackson’s musical development from the early Motown days, through to the collision with the disco movement of the late 1970’s that produced his great songs of the early 1980’s, with their driving rhythms and dark, soul-driven lyrics.

In the second half, the sound quality begins to suffer from a messy reverberation that cuts across the work of an excellent six-piece band, and the music sometimes seems overwhelmed by the effort to recreate onstage the look and feel of some of Jackson’s iconic pop videos.   But by the end of the evening, fulll tribute has been paid to the range of Jackson’s work, from satanic disco to save-the-world anthems.  When one of the singers offered the thought that though Michael is gone, his music will live on, the audience roared their approval; and it seemed to me that Michael Jackson would have been glad to hear them, and gladder still to hear his great repertoire of songs performed once more, not only with feeling, but with joy.

ENDS ENDS

Michael Jackson, Farrah Fawcett, And The Faint Chance Of A Change In Our Frenzied Celebrity Culture – Column 27.6.09

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JOYCE MCMILLAN for The Scotsman 27.6.09
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ON MY COMPUTER SCREEN, courtesy of YouTube, the little figure flickers and sparkles, just a couple of inches high.  The image is of Michael Jackson, singing his great hit Billie Jean – the one where the singer repeatedly denies paternity of a baby boy born to a girl he once knew – at the Tamla Motown 25th anniversary concert, back in 1985.   In the video, Jackson is 27 years old, and probably at the height of his powers.   His face is slim and sculpted, as though he might have had a nose-job here, a chin-tuck there; but the screen shows what by any measure is an electrifying performance of a brilliant song, given by a handsome young black guy with a tremendous gospel voice, a real gift for movement, and infinite star quality.

What happened to Jackson later is already showbiz history; the operations and self-mutilations, the slow bleaching of the skin, the accusations of child abuse, the pet chimpanzee, the Neverland Ranch, the strange marriages, and the uneasy family of children of uncertain parentage.  Yet venture out onto the internet this weekend, into the social networking sites and music blogs, and you’ll find that among the online generation – which now includes a good half of the population under 50 – Jackson’s death, along with that of 70’s Charlie’s Angels star Farrah Fawcett, has simply overwhelmed all other topics of discussion.  The tone is ambivalent, of course; an odd mix of awestruck hero-worship and ribald abuse, with even poor Farrah Fawcett attracting a measure of scorn for her determination to document and film her unglamorous final illness.

But that’s how our celebrity culture works: it contains a terrifying mix of the urge to worship, and the need to tear down and destroy.  And in that sense, Michael Jackson has surely been the celebrity of celebrities, with a life almost designed to feed those contradictions.  He was a songwriter and performer of terrific talent, adored by the millions of fans whose love he sought, as compensation for a miserably abusive chldhood.  Yet at the same time, he was a tragic and dangerous mess of a man, apparently unable to live at ease with his face, his race, his gender, or his sexuality; or to survive the stress of trying – at the age of 50 -  to live up to his own stupendous reputation as live performer, in a planned series of huge new London concerts.

So it’s perhaps worth asking, as a wave of vicarious grief and double-edged mourning sweeps the planet, whether these deaths might mark the beginning of the end of the near-hysterical age of celebrity through which we have lived.   In one sense, of course, Jackson and Fawcett are old-fashioned celebrities, in that they actually achieved fame through their work, back in the 1970’s; today, a mere passing affair with someone on the celebrity circuit seems to be enough to guarantee star status.

But all the same, they have both been part of that landscape of celebrity that has emerged, over the last 30 years, as a  vicarious replacement for the local community and family life that so many of us used to know, well within living memory; but which has been comprehensively fragmented by the turbo-charged social and economic changes of the last 40 years.  As any schoolteacher will tell you, in a world where most ordinary social landmarks of status and belonging have gradually been eroded , fame and wealth stand out as the only significant  measures of achievement and identity to which young people can aspire; hence an increasingly absurd intensity of identification with figures from Princess Diana to Jade Goody, Michael Jackson to David Beckham, who live lives completely  beyond the experience of all but a tiny minority, and yet are somehow seen as close acquaintances, whose lives and deaths may mean more to us than those of close family members.

And the questions is this: that if our world is on the cusp of major change, with economic collapse and growing resource pressures forcing us to rediscover the value of social capital and human attachment, and perhaps of a more localised way of life, then is there perhaps a chance that we will stop needing our virtual celebrity narrative so much, and start giving the stars a break, in terms of intrusive pressure on their private lives?

The story could go either way, of course. Back in the 1930’s, when times were hard, Hollywood became a global dream factory of immense power, offering the huddled masses from Los Angeles to Luton a glittering escape from hard lives; the British economic upheavals of the 1970’s and 80’s spawned a generation lost in music, still crazy for the rough glamour of the old rebellious bands, a quarter of a century on.  And whatever happens in our world over the next decade, we can be sure that the virtual realms of the internet – from Facebook to Second Life – will continue to challenge, complement or cut across more traditional forms of social connection and solidarity.

But I think it’s worth hoping, all the same, that the worst of our obsessive hunger for connection with the world of celebrity may begin to pass, as reality bites a little harder.  At the very least, we might begin to ask of our stars that they do more than mate and reproduce and divorce, all under a hideous glare of intrusive “lifestyle” coverage; that they once again actually sing songs or tell stories that enrich and illuminate our lives.   At his best – way back in the glittering 1980’s – Michael Jackson certainly achieved that.  And for the rest – well, let’s hope that justice has been done, to everyone who encountered Jackson in his life; and that his troubled spirit, symbol of a nerve-wracked age of fame, can eventually rest in peace.

ENDS ENDS

Mixter Maxter – NTS Transform At The St. Magnus Festival

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JOYCE MCMILLAN on MIXTER MAXTER – THE SHOW, MIXTER MAXTER – THE INSTALLATION and other events,  St. Magnus Festival, Orkney, for Scotsman Arts 25.6.09
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Mixter Maxter – The Show  4 stars ****
Mixter Maxter – The Installation  5 stars *****

IN THE PIER ARTS CENTRE in Stromness, this summer, there’s a deep, dark space given over to a magnificent piece of video art called Ascension, by US superstar Bill Viola.  Filmed underwater, from a couple of feet below a sunlit surface, it shows in slow motion – and in the deepest blue and silver – a male figure plunging feet-first through that surface, and down past our gaze, into the depths; then for ages afterwards, we watch the backwash of tiny bubbles and sparkles rising from where he fell, up towards the sunlight, a billion particles disturbed and moving and reacting, almost to infinity, because of that single action, that single leap.

The Pier Arts exhibition is not technically part of this year’s St. Magnus Festival in Orkney; but all the same, the Bill Viola work seems to provide a central image for a festival built, as always, around the pull and surge of the sea that surrounds Orkney, and the mystical sense of the interrelatedness of all things – humanity, nature, the very stuff of earth and water – that forms a key part of Orkney culture.  And it would have been easy for the National Theatre of Scotland, wading into the delicate balance of island life for a few months to create a Transform project with young people from Kirkwall Grammar School, to have failed to produce anything that truly reflected that special spirit of the place.

Instead, though, the Mixter Maxter project – directed by Davey Anderson and Liam Hurley, with a team of more than two dozen students in their early-to-mid teens – has produced both a moving and memorable short show, and an outstanding installation, in an old warehouse in Bridge Street, that both  complements and expands the performance to create what must be one of the finest pieces of youth project artwork Scotland has ever produced.

The show is a deceptively simple-looking piece, played in a bare in-the-round setting in King Street Halls, which tells the story of a Kirkwall girl called Soley, who runs away from her own life, driven partly by the unkindness of her so-called school friends, and partly by her widowed father’s inability to talk to her about her mother’s death, ten years ago.  Played by a series of different girls identified simply by slipping on Soley’s little red hoodie, she runs first to an old warehouse where she keeps a little shrine to her mother, then to the pierhead, where she leaps aboard a ferry, looks out at the pattern of islands ahead and, like the Bill Viola figure, makes a leap from the deck into the ocean, towards what she hopes will be a new or changed life.

At King Street, the story is told verbally and through movement, superbly co-ordinated by Simon Pittman to capture the running, darting movements, the wary walking, the intent faces and scanning eyes, of teenagers marking a way through potentially hostile streets and spaces.  The show ends quietly, with a series of questions about the future; but as the young cast circle the hall, intently pressing little imaginary seeds of new life into the hands of Mums and Dads, old folks and tiny toddlers, the sense of empathy and almost of atonement towards a troubled generation of youngsters is overwhelming, and many in the audience are wiping away tears.

If the show is powerful, though, the installation down in the old Bridge Street rope warehouse is irresistible, a series of evocations of settings, images and ideas from Soley’s story – in video, sculpture, projected text, soundscapes and audio journeys, with elements of live performance – that is stewarded with palpable pride by the young people who helped create it, and by the artists (including Kim Beveridge, Alistair Peebles and Anne Bevan) who helped them.  The sense of young people reconnecting with aspects of Orkney’s past as a seafaring and farming island, exploring its rich cultural heritage, and using it to make sense of their own lives today, is intense; and although the Warehouse 18 installation was dismantled on Monday, along with the rest of the project, the young people I spoke to expressed an intense hope that it could somehow live on, and be seen again.

If the NTS show and installation represented a fine example of how to combine different art-forms with power and integrity, though, some of the other “crossover” events in the Festival served to demonstrate just how uneasy such collisions can be.  The outgoing Poet Laureate, Andrew Motion, made a decent if slightly diffident job of his St. Magnus Cathedral concert with the Endellion String Quartet, which combined Haydn’s oratorio Seven Last Words From The Cross with his own very fine, searching and moving poetry cycle on the subject; perhaps because the quality of the words came close to matching that of the music.

Down at Stromness, on the other hand, it was hard to imagine what had possessed the Festival director to give house-room to Wendy Cope’s banal series of poems about different types of audience members at a classical music concert, which recycles a series of infinitely tired cultural assumptions about the art-form, and makes Roxanna Panufnik’s cheerful illustrative music, played with good humour by the same Endellion Quartet, sound like high art by comparison.

The idea of interludes like this is that they represent a bit of harmless, self-mocking  fun.  But if they make a mighty art-form like classical music seem boring, bourgeois, and middlebrow,  then they’re not harmless at all.  St. Magnus needs to consign this sort of ageing crowd-pleaser to the bin; and strike out boldly into the newly-emerging borderlands between classical music and a dozen other art-forms less stuffy than mainstream poetry, and far less concerned about the old social hierarchy of art – from posh to popular – that the 21st century is scattering to the four winds, in Orkney as elsewhere.

ENDS ENDS

Romeo And Juliet

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JOYCE MCMILLAN on ROMEO AND JULIET at Oran Mor, Glasgow, for The Scotsman 24.6.09
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4 stars ****

HOWEVER HIGH IT stands in the catalogue of world drama, Shakespeare’s Romeo And Juliet is never an easy play.   If tragedy is about the inevitable destruction of a fatally flawed hero or heroine, then Shakespeare’s most famous doomed romance is hardly a tragedy; yet precisely because its ending seems like nothing but an unhappy accident, its grim conclusion can seem unbearably, almost pointlessly, sad.

What’s interesting about this brief 40-minute version of the play, created as a rousing finale to this spring’s astonishing 21-show lunchtime season at Oran Mor, is that it tackles this narrative ambiguity head-on, and with a creativity and insight that puts many full-length productions to shame.  In adapting the text, Mary McCluskey boldly slices the story into vivid, familiar chunks of monologue and dialogue, and rearranges them in a fragmented flashback structure; so that the action begins with the double tragedy at the Capulets’ tomb, and every line of the earlier poetry – comic, romantic, lyrical – becomes saturated with a sense of the doom to come.

In this dark version of the play, directed and designed with impressive flair by Kenny Miller, Sally Reid turns in a heartrending performance as a haunted, hopeful but bewildered Juliet, ambushed by grief at the height of her carefree youth.  And Julie Austin, as the friendly Nurse/Friar, becomes a kind of familiar devil; taunting poor Juliet with the possibility of happiness, but all the while leading her on towards that grim moment in the tomb, and her heartbreaking, avoidable death.

ENDS ENDS

Calman Report Looks Out Of Time In A Post-Unionist Age – Column 20.6.09

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JOYCE MCMILLAN for The Scotsman 20.6.09
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FORGIVE ME, READERS: but this week, I am suffering from a touch of cognitive dissonance.   On one hand, you see, I find before me the 20-page Executive Summary of the report of the Calman Commission, which has just delivered its verdict on ten years of devolution, with recommendations for the future.  The summary, of course, is as sensible, august and well-argued a piece of constitutional prose as you might expect from such a panel of distinguished establishment Scots.  With a nudge-nudge here and a tweak-tweak there, Calman has revisited the devolution settlement of 1998, and made almost sixty recommendations about how it can be rationalised and improved, from identifying areas where Scotland might benefit from more devolved power – drink-driving law, broadcasting – to naming a few, notably the registration of charities, where greater cross-border unity might save time and confusion.

The report also includes an energetic wish-list on improved co-operation between Westminster and Holyrood, Whitehall and Victoria Quay.  And in a lurch towards real radicalism, the Commissioners argue that the Scottish Parliament should now begin to take responsibility for raising some of the taxpayers’ money it spends, mainly by fixing the level of the top slice of income tax paid in Scotland, so as to make it the same as in the rest of the UK, or lower, or higher, depending on spending decisions.

The result has been a field-day, in Scotland this week, for policy wonks on all sides of the constitutional debate; and – on the Unionist side at least – a broad welcome for the report, as a clever, detailed and well-informed proposal that strikes a deft balance between caution and radicalism, and proposes a way forward that all the mainstream parties, with the obvious exception of the SNP, will find attractive to implement.

Yet somehow, as I picked my way through the well-balanced paragraphs of the Calman summary, I couldn’t resist the feeling that the document somehow belonged to a world that has simply slipped from our grasp, in the years since 1999; a world of modest, rational, incremental progress, and of sensible provisions for the improvement of British government and society, that seems suddenly unreal.  For on the other hand, scanning the media this week, I see report after report which suggests a system in deepening crisis, in which old political and economic frameworks are beginning to crack under the strain, and in which a few well-thought out recommendations about the conduct of Joint Ministerial Committees no longer seem adequate to the demands of the time.

To the left of us, for example, there’s the continuing story of the Westminster expenses scandal, with all its increasingly profound ramifications.  Of course, in theory, Calman’s proposals for a future of rational Unionism ought to find favour with a Scottish electorate most of whom are not committed supporters of independence.  But in practice, at a time when Westminster’s reputation with voters throughout the UK is at rock-bottom – and when this week’s staggeringly inept release of heavily-censored expenses details has only made matters worse – Calman’s  unquestioning Unionist pieties strike a strange note, both complacent and old-fashioned.

It’s not that there is no remaining case to be made for the retention of the Union.  But under current conditions, where positive support for Unionism – as opposed to negative fear of independence – has all but vanished from the Scottish political landscape, the argument has to be made much more explicitly and humbly than this.  Scottish voters, always pragmatic in their attitude to the Union, tend to be happy with it when Westminster governments are strong, dynamic and progressive, and to lose interest in it when those governments  are weak, disorganised and drifting towards the right.  We are currently deep in the second kind of phase, with Scottish unionist politicians mired to their ears in the nasty, long-drawn-out collapse of the New Labour project.  And in such times, with an SNP government in power at Holyrood, it is almost discourteous – and certainly politically naive – to talk, as Calman does, as if there were no serious argument against the retention of power over macroeconomic policy at Westminster.

And if the Brown government’s entanglement in the current expenses scandal is creating a hostile political climate for Calman’s kind of Unionism, then it’s arguable that the much bigger political failures of the New Labour years – now coming home to roost, one by one – are placing a serious question mark over the whole future of the Union.  From the inquiry into the Iraq War, through the spiralling economic collapse and Fred Goodwin’s pension, to this week’s horrific figures on likely climate change by 2100, the record shows a supposedly progressive UK government – stuffed with historically high numbers of Scottish ministers – making one ill-judged compromise after another with an out-of-control global system that had come to believe its own ideological hype; and therefore failing to deliver serious policy progress on all the major issues, from global peace to climate change, that now place our whole future in jeopardy.

Calman may be right, in other words, to claim that devolution has been a success, so far as it goes.  But public approval for the existence of the Scottish Parliament no longer implies much enthusiasm for the UK framework in which it sits.  And although a joyful surge of positive support for Scottish independence is very unlikely, in the frightening political landscape we now inhabit, we could nonetheless be on the brink of a slow, disgruntled slide towards separation; if only because the debt-ridden Westminster of the Brown-Cameron era seems to offer us so little, in the way of a future, that we might as well strike out on our own, and see if we can improve our chances by the kind of margin – small but significant – that Alex Salmond, as a gambling man himself, would consider well worth the risk.

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Balgay Hill, Cyrano De Bergerac, The Garden Of Adrian

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JOYCE MCMILLAN on BALGAY HILL at Dundee Rep, CYRANO DE BERGERAC at Oran Mor, Glasgow, and THE GARDEN OF ADRIAN at Gilmorehill G12, Glasgow, for Scotsman Arts, 18.6.09
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Balgay Hill    3 stars ***
Cyrano De Bergerac  2 stars **
The Garden Of Adrian   4 stars  ****

IT’S ONE OF THE TRAGEDIES of British culture that cities and regions outside London so often struggle to escape from the margins of a national narrative completely dominated by the seething arts-and-media metropolis on the Thames.  Other cities have their brief moments in the sun, of course: Liverpool in the 1960’s, Glasgow around 1990.  But soon, London labels and packages whatever the “provinces” have produced, and moves on; so that people living around the Mersey and the Clyde, the Tyne and the Tay, are left starving for any sense that their home place could actually be at the creative centre of the world, rather than stuck on the edge.

It’s this phenomenon – and the huge, exhilarating shock of encountering an artist powerful enough to challenge and change it -  that lies at the heart of Simon Macallum’s Balgay Hill, Dundee Rep’s tentative but thoughtful new show about the life and legacy of great Dundee rock star Billy Mackenzie, lead singer of the charismatic 1980’s band The Associates.  The play takes the form of  four intertwined monologues that explore the impact of MacKenzie’s music – and of the extraordinary, operatic sound of his voice in hits like Party Fears Two and Club Country – on four different Dundee characters.  There’s Stephen, the early 1980’s school-leaver whose whole sense of style and possibility is radically altered by the sound of MacKenzie’s music.  There’s Sinead, the 21st century teenage wild child trying to redeem herself by making a good film about Billy and his life.  There’s Michael, the now middle-aged younger brother of Stephen, back in Dundee after decades in America; and there’s Kennedy, an American woman in Dundee whom Michael once loved.

To say that these four monologues rarely connect in any satisfying dramatic way, is to undertstate the problems of Macallum’s script.  Director James Brining has to work very hard, in an increasingly well-worn and irritating jump-cut style, to generate a sense of pace out of these oddly-chosen narratives, which often seem just to miss the main point of the story; and the use of visual images from MacKenzie’s life projected on small and large screens around the stage, and of fragments of his music, seems confused and inconsistent.

With all these limitations, though – and a certain sad tendency to raise easy, self-deprecating laughs by simply mentioning Dundee words and places – the play still nudges its way towards  the heart of that moment of personal transformation that the right music, at the right time, can bring to a whole generation.   Robin Laing gives an outstanding performance as young Stephen, hearing Billy’s voice for the first time; and if the play still seems more like a work-in-progress than a finished show, it’s nonetheless an interesting and poignant one, that opens up the possibility of better work to come.

Back in the early 1990’s, when Edwin Morgan’s rip-roaring Scots version of Cyrano De Bergerac first opened, it too had a background regional theme about roughly-spoken soldier-boys from Gascony trying to make it among the officers of the king’s army.  But if the strong Scots voice of Morgan’s version survives into this week’s half-hour Corona Classic Cuts version, in the lunchtime season at Oran Mor, it does so in a form so lacking in nuance and cultural precision that it only reinforces the old, dreary stereotype that Scots is a “rough” language, comically unsuited for talk about love, romance and beauty.  Gary Collins and Ryan Fletcher do their best to vary the tone, over half an hour of dialogue about how the beautiful Christian will borrow the ugly Cyrano’s magnificent words to win Roxane’s heart.  But when it comes to using the power of voice and gesture to overturn stereotypes about what the Scots language can be, neither they nor their director Selma Dimitrijevic seem to have a clue.  They sometimes attempt vehement feeling, but they absolutely lack grace; and without that, Rostand’s great romance is reduced to a round of furious bluster, signifying nothing.

Meanwhile, at Gilmorehill G12, the remarkable performance artist Adrian Howells marks the end of his three-year Glasgow project by taking over the main upper room of the drama centre – an old religious meeting house – and transforming it into an exquisitely peaceful indoor garden, in which he can pursue his investigation of what happens when audience members are invited, just one at a time, into an intimate encounter with – well, what?  It’s partly an encounter with Adrian himself, of course, his soft hands leading us along the raised wooden pathways of his garden, washing our hands and forearms in a little pool, feeding luscious strawberries into our mouths, and spreading out the rug on which we lie together and rest for a while.

What Adrian creates, though, is something much greater than a moment of personal contact.  At one level, he offers us a complete and almost religious respite from the ordinary pace and gracelessness of urban lives; suddenly, there are infinite moments just to savour the feel of  grass beneath our bare feet, or to listen to the sound of our own breath.  And at another, he offers us the kind of simple, child-like intimacy of touch that so many solitary 21st century lives now lack.  All this is deep, thought-provoking stuff, very near the emotional knuckle.  But for those with open minds and hearts, the experience of  The Garden Of Adrian is an extraordinary one; and there’s a little seedling to bring home, too, as a symbol of the growth that is possible, if we only give ourselves a little time, space, warmth, and light.

Balgay Hill at Dundee Rep until 27 June.  Cyrano De Bergerac at Oran Mor, Glasgow, and The Garden Of Adrian at Gilmorehill G12 Glasgow, both untiil Saturday, 20 June.

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