Joyce McMillan online…

All my writing on theatre and general social/political issues is available online here.

Everything on the site appears in date order, below, beginning with the most recent column or review.  Most of these pieces are commissioned by, and first appear in, The Scotsman. Ultimate ownership of copyright remains with me, and is asserted here.

If you want to search the site for something specific, type your keyword(s) into the “search” space on the right, and press return.  If you prefer to read in standard black-on-white, press “view” in the toolbar at the top of the screen, choose “page style”, and select “no style” (!).

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.com

© Joyce McMillan 2011

Inequality Is Rife, Yet UK Politics Moves Relentlessly To The Right: Why Just One Party Bears Most Of The Blame – Column 17.5.13.

_______________________________________

JOYCE MCMILLAN for The Scotsman, 17.5.13.
_______________________________________

DIVIDE AND RULE. It’s the oldest mantra in the boss-class book, the golden strategy of tyrants and bullies down the ages; and there can never have been a place or a time in which it has worked better than here in Britain, in the spring of 2013. On one hand, the real statistics surrounding our economy tell one story, and one story only; an ugly yarn about vast and growing economic inequality, with a top 1% of the population commanding an ever-greater slice of national wealth and incomes, while all those in the bottom 80% – from the very poorest to senior middle-class professionals – see their incomes stagnate or dwindle, in real terms.

And with the increasing relative wealth of large corporations and wealthy individuals in our society, comes ever-increasing power. From the financing of political parties, through the ownership of major media, to the revolving door between top companies and the government departments which are supposed to regulate them, major wealth-holders are now able to drive and influence the work of government for the outlay of what are relatively minor sums, weighed in the scale of their operations.

The results of their influence are now obvious everywhere in our public life, from the disastrous failure of bank regulation that led to the 2008 global crash, through the current unwanted English NHS changes, to the growing avalanche of cases in which major corporations have struck “sweetheart” deals with Britain’s tax authority, the HMRC. Tax evasion and avoidance alone – never mind the massive additional tax breaks and grants given by governments to major corporations – is thought to cost the British exchequer around £35 billion a year, more than the entire budget of the Scottish Government; and it is perfectly clear that if this looting of the economy by the already wealthy was stopped, then we could not only forget the largely fictional narrative of essential “austerity” currently being peddled to the people, but also restart our depressed domestic economy, by raising the incomes or reducing the taxes of ordinary households, many of which are currently struggling to pay basic bills.

Yet at this crisis in our affairs, with the generation-long embrace of the neoliberal “Washington consensus” producing a huge and utterly predictable political and economic crisis across the west, what topics are really animating the British people and their representatives, if the day-to-babble of Westminster politics is to be believed? Why, the hunt for the fierce, bad benefit claimants who are supposedly draining our economy, and for the immigrants who have supposedly taken our jobs and houses, combined with a revolt against the European Union which has the temerity to inspect our oil companies properly for price-fixing practices, and to insist that EU workers should not be forced to work more than 48 hours a week.

Now in every case, the set of beliefs being peddled about these issues is false, and easily disprovable. Benefit fraud, for example, at around £1 billion a year, is a mere drop in the ocean compared with the massive avoidance of tax by those who could easily afford to pay. Yet day after day, a kind of surreal macho dialogue about who can be “toughest” over these essentially fictional issues utterly dominates Westminster politics; while the economy flatlines, decent working people lie awake at night worrying over the financial consequences of an economic crash for which they are not responsible, and – somewhere in the background – our beautiful planet begins to burn and die, because we lack the political sense and sinew to act to save it.

Now to say that this is an unpleasant sight is to understate the case. It is not only morally disgraceful in its “othering” and scapegoating of vulnerable groups; it is also intellectually contemptible, almost militantly stupid. Only a fool could seriously believe that the ragbag of policies currently being proposed by the Westminster government on Europe, migration or benefits has anything to do with tackling the UK’s real problems; and every voter who has fallen for this ancient boss-class scam bears some responsibility for their own gullibility and intellectual laziness.

In the end, though, the main fault has to lie with the vacuum of political leadership that has been allowed to grow up on the centre-left of British politics, since the 1980’s; when the chips are down, there can be no serious or substantive political debate among three right-of-centre parties – Labour, the Conservatives, and the Liberal Democrats – who all agree that the deficit lie is sacrosanct, who all take the corporate shilling, and who all think that myths about immigrants and benefit scrourngers should be flattered and acted upon rather than challenged.

This week, I headed along to the King’s Theatre in Edinburgh to see The Pitmen Painters, the great 2007 play by Billy Elliot writer Lee Hall about the Ashington Group, a band of four Durham miners who briefly became the toast of the art world in the 1930’s. It’s a sentimental play, in many ways; but it is salutary to remember a time when at least some of Britain’s working people organised to educate themselves, to analyse the economy they lived in, and to raise themselves up by their own collective bootstraps. And they achieved change, of course – notably in 1945 – through a Labour Party created to represent their interests, in the highest corridors of British power.

Whether Labour can ever become that party again – can ever end its cringe-making Blairite love-affair with global capitalism at its most foolish, can ever stop apologising for its trade union connections, can ever focus once again on the task of representing ordinary British workers and consumers, rather than those who would exploit them – is a matter of debate. What’s clear, though, is that it is not that party now, and has not been, for the last 20 years. And if it fails to change the political game before the next Westminster election – or, at best, the one after that – then the Labour Party will not only have helped seal the fate of what is, regardless of next year’s referendum result, an increasingly strained union between England and the rest of the UK; it will have written its own obituary, as a party whose continuing existence has any point at all.

ENDS ENDS

The Bear

__________________________________________________

JOYCE MCMILLAN on THE BEAR at the Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh, for The Scotsman 17.5.13.
__________________________________________________

3 stars ***

ARE YOU ANGRY? Do you let yourself get angry? If not – well, you might find yourself in the surrealist-noir world of this stylish new show by Angela Clerkin with Improbable Theatre, visiting the Traverse this weekend. Directed by Lee Simpson of Improbable, the show begins as a small-scale legal drama. On a little box-set that turns and broods in the middle of a dark stage, Angela Clerkin plays the central character, a London solicitor’s clerk caught up in the case of a man who seems to have murdered his business partner, for whom his wife has just left him.

The man claims, though, that he is innocent, and that his partner was killed by a bear. Angela initially dismisses the story, but soon begins to discover that the accused is not the only person to have glimpsed the bear; and eventually – after one or two fierce bursts of song from herself and her co-performer, Guy Dartnell – she begins to see it herself.

At the heart of the show, in other words, there is a slightly clunky metaphor about a very personal kind of anger. The bear represents our suppressed rage about the emotional betrayals and disappointments we suffer, with our families, or with our partners; it’s an idea that seems a little thin to support an 85-minute show, mainly made up of narrative and monologue. Along the way, though, Clerkin and Dartnell – backed by Nick Powell’s music, Mark Cunningham’s sound, and some fine lighting and design – achieve both some elegant moments, and some pleasingly wacky ones. There’s a feeling of an urban civilisation on the edge of something primal and frightening; and like the fox in the garden that stalked so many Fringe shows last year, the idea of the bear on the allotments perhaps carries a hidden strand of political meaning, just beyond the reach of this play.

ENDS ENDS

Ghost – The Musical

_________________________________________________________

JOYCE MCMILLAN on GHOST – THE MUSICAL at the Playhouse, Edinburgh, for The Scotsman 16.5.13.
_________________________________________________________

4 stars ****

IT’S PROBABLY no concidence that the story of Ghost – first a smash-hit film, and now a mighty blockbuster musical – dates from the same period as Tony Kushner’s great millennial American fantasy, Angels In America. In the years before 2000, the western world seemed to throw itself into a last, wild romance with the supernatural, and with religious imagery; hence Bruce Joel Rubin’s powerful and prescient screenplay about a young Wall Street banker killed in the street because he knows too much about some dodgy deals, who comes back, through sheer force of willpower, to save his beloved girlfriend from the same dangerous men who had him murdered.

Now, Rubin’s story has been transformed into a spectacular two-and-a-half-hour stage show, with a cast of almost 20 and a playlist of a dozen new songs, by a team of musicians and lyricists that includes Glen Ballard, and Dave Stewart of the Eurythmics; and although most of the music is standard rock-musical stuff – shouty, hyper-emotional ballads, with little subtlety – it provides a tide of souped-up sound on which to float a dazzling and sometimes beautiful visual spectacle, in which stunning design, film and graphics, projected onto all three walls of the stage, interact with some terrific company choreography in the street scenes, and four powerful, punchy leading performances, integrated into the spectacle. There are thrilling illusions by Paul Kieve, as Sam learns how to walk through walls at will; there are exciting images of the subway system, beautiful washes of Manhattan light in Molly’s flat, and rainy street-scenes featuring Magritte-like ranks of umbrellas. The story is hopelessly romantic, the heaven-and-hell imagery pure hokum; but everyone involved in the Ghost design team – from designer Rob Howell on down – should take a bow for one of the most visually exciting shows ever seen at the Playhouse; a kind of surreal film with live actors, and beautiful with it.

ENDS ENDS

As It Is, #sleeptightbobbycairns, Marco Pantani The Pirate, The Pitmen Painters

_________________________________________________________

JOYCE MCMILLAN on AS IT IS and #SLEEPTIGHTBOBBYCAIRNS at the Tron Theatre, Glasgow, MARCO PANTANI THE PIRATE at Oran Mor, Glasgow, and THE PITMEN PAINTERS at the King’s Theatre, Edinburgh, for Scotsman Arts, 16.5.13.
__________________________________________________________

As It Is 4 stars ****
#sleeptightbobbycairns 3 stars ***
Marco Pantani The Pirate 3 stars ****
The Pitmen Painters 4 stars ****

THEY SAY that the truth will set us free; and yet often it seems to be the comforting lie we need, the one we tell about ourselves, our motives, our history. Damir Todorovic is an actor from Serbia, now aged 40 and based in Italy, an associate artist of the Glasgow-based international company Vanishing Point. Twenty years ago, though, he was a young Serbian soldier on the battlefield in Bosnia, during the bloody civil war in former Yugoslavia; and in his quiet, chilling and compelling show As It Is – first created for a festival in Switzerland, and now on tour to Glasgow – he subjects himself to an intense one-hour lie-detector test, in which he answers questions based on his wartime diary.

The questions are devised and asked by a second actor, Pauline Goldsmith, who plays the inquisitor; they are different at each performance, and the lie-detector is real, its shifting needles projected on a screen above the stage. Yet if the audience imagines that the machine will help them find out “the truth” about Todorovic’s war experience, that illusion is soon swept away; lie-detector technology is not infallible, and the same question – “Do you love your wife?” – can provoke completely different responses at different times.

So the show leads us on a complex and sometimes exhausting journey through the shidting ground of memory, tracing – at best – areas of unease in Damir’s mind, around his strong Serbian identity, a scene of atrocity he witnessed, and a sexual encounter with a nurse in a field hospital. And although it is sometimes painful to watch Todorovic struggling through veils of memory which he says have often “turned to stone” in his mind, As It Is emerges as an unforgettable piece of theatre, illuminated by a searing central performance from an actor with the courage to play himself when young, to strive for honesty, and to take the consequences.

Upstairs in the Tron Meeting-Room, meanwhile, there’s another personal journey with heavy political overtones going on, in #sleeptightbobbycairns, a 50-minute monologue with interruptions by young Glasgow company Enormous Yes. The central character is Layla, played with poignant force by Millie Turner; she is a fervent member of a cult called #neednothing, run by a leader called Sam who has left for Peru, and she seems intent on encouraging her audience of ten people, ranged round a table, to get involved with the cult’s latest campaign, against a suave local councillor and former cult member, Bobby Cairns.

Things do not go as Layla hoped; the cult turns out to be a scam, and she launches into a long lament for her generation, the people now in their mid-20’s who were 14 when the planes slammed into the twin towers, and 16 when Britain went to war in Iraq, despite some of the biggest anti-war protests in history. The sense of privilege combined with desperation, a kind of terminal crisis of credible motivation and action, is haunting; and although Michael O’Neill’s script takes a while to find its focus, and sometimes drifts into Radio-4-style middle-class whimsy, it has moments of such blazing despair and need that it fairly chills the blood, and challenges the conscience.

As Layla senses, driving individual ambition is not enough for most human beings; and there’s plenty of evidence of that in the latest Play, Pie And Pint lunchtime show, a new 45-minute play by Stuart Hepburn about the Italian cycling champion Marco Pantani, who died in 2004 at the age of 34. Marco Pantani The Pirate is a complex three-handed narrative, delivered by an excellent Jordan Young as Marco himself, with Blythe Duff as his mother, and James Smillie as his bearded grandfather; it’s backed by images of Pantani’s career, and by a set featuring fragments of bikes. As a play, it is still a long way from perfection; there’s too much relentless exposition of the detail of Pantani’s career, and the long sequences of names and incidents almost defeat both Duff and Smillie at times. Yet there’s an intensity about this drama of obsession and self-destruction – its shape, its energy, its fierce tragic momentum – that burns it into the memory; it’s a story that deserves a longer life, and may well get one.

For a powerful image of what the collective life looks like, though – of its rich rewards, its inherent strength, and the way it can nonetheless limit the ambition of those who are loyal to it – there is no better show in current British theatre than Lee Hall’s great 2007 play The Pitmen Painters, about the group of four miners from Ashington in County Durham who, back in the 1930’s, briefly won fame as artists. Already reviewed when it visited Glasgow in 2011, Max Roberts’s fierce, fast-flowing production for Live Theatre, Newcastle and the National Theatre, London, remains a magnificent ensemble show, both richly comic and profoundly moving in its insight into the history of power, class and art in Britain. It’s an intensely political play, with little room for right-wing dissent. But for those who can enter into its rich and poignant evocation of a class pulling itself up by its bootstraps, towards the defining moment in 1947 when Britain’s coalmines were taken into public ownership, it makes an unforgettable evening’s theatre; entertaining and enriching, yet full of a deep sense of history, and of its dark ironies.

As It Is and #sleeptightbobbycairns, both at the Tron Theatre, Glasgow, until Saturday. Marco Pantani The Pirate at Oran Mor, Glasgow, until Saturday, and at the Beacon Arts Centre, Greenock, on Sunday. The Pitmen Painters at the King’s Theatre, Edinburgh, until Saturday.

PERFORMANCE OF THE WEEK

In a week full of fine performances, one stands out as unforgettable. Damir Todorovic’s performance as himself, in the lie-detector drama As It Is, not only leads us into a disturbing exploration of the grey areas between truth and lies; it also reminds us of one of the most profound traumas in recent European history, as it opens up the mind of a fastidious and private man caught up in the savage civil war in former Yugoslavia, and forced to carry in his mind a series of memories that make truth difficult, and silence often the least painful option.

ENDS ENDS

Chalk About, Ilo, Wanted: Rabbit

________________________________________________________

JOYCE MCMILLAN on CHALK ABOUT at North Edinburgh Arts Centre, ILO at the Traverse Theatre, and WANTED:RABBIT at Churchiil Theatre, Edinburgh, for The Scotsman 14.5.13.
_______________________________________________________

Chalk About 4 stars ****
Ilo 3 stars ***
Wanted: Rabbit 3 stars ***

TIME WAS when Imaginate – then known as the Children’s International Theatre Festival – was all about watching in wonder, as children’s theatre artists from across Europe and beyond showed us the magic of world-class children’s theatre.

No more, though; for this year, successful Scottish-made shows like Fleeto, The Day I Swapped My Dad For Two Goldfish, and The Curious Scrapbook Of Josephine Bean have been fairly dominating the Imaginate scene. And the same is true of Chalk About, the latest show from Scottish dancer-choreographer Christine Devaney, and her company Curious Seed. Deceptively simple in presentation, and inspired by recorded interviews with children in the eight-plus age-group for which it’s designed, Chalk About involves a bare stage marked with some basic chalk outlines, a few simple props, and two dancer-performers, Devaney herself and Leandro Kees.

Yet in just 50 minutes, it leads it audience deep into the stuff of human identity, using both movement and spoken dialogue to discuss family and origins, nationality and gender, happiness, sadness, and the way we express ourselves through the things we like, from pizza to disco music. The movement is often witty, and sometimes beautiful; and Devaney and Kees give a brave, honest and delightful pair of performances, full of a rich sense of the joy of human difference, and of the pulsing, male-female energy of life itself.

There’s a similar idea behind Compagnie ChaliWate of Belgium’s gorgeous-looking show Ilo, a brief 45-minute piece of dance and movement which appeared at the Traverse over the weekend. Created by performer/directors Sandrine Heyraud and Sicaire Durieux, the show involves a desert encounter between a man lost in the burning sand, and a creature who at first seems like a walking plant in a giant earthenware pot, but soon morphs into a beautiful woman. Most of the show consists of slightly old-fashioned physical comedy and mime, as the couple fight over a bottle of water, make up, imagine a trip to the ocean. In its more lyrical moments, though, the choreography is beautiful; and the visual imagery of the show is truly memorable, with its rich design of deep green costumes against a landscape of sand and terracotta, and a big, burning orange sun.

Meanwhile, up at Churchhill Theatre, Maas Theater En Dans of the Netherland have been entertaining the under-5’s with a jolly 30-minute satire called Wanted: Rabbit, about a pompous and inefficient chief of police – and his irritatingly glamorous detective, a siren in pigtails – trying and failing to prevent the invasion of their town by a plague of cheeky rabbits. The little black-and-white model of the town that forms the set is a joy, as the creaky miniature police-car lumbers around trying to catch the rabbits, who pop out of little holes all over the place. Sadly, though – and despite the best efforts of the police chief’s sensible assistant – the script is not up to the standard of the set, and the interaction between the three characters becomes a shade leaden; just as well that the show ends with a bowl of carrots passed round the audience, and a sound of happy munching, from at least some of the assembled tiny tots.

ENDS ENDS

#Torycore

__________________________________________________________

JOYCE MCMILLAN on #TORYCORE at the Glad Cafe, Glasgow, for The Scotsman 13.5.13.
__________________________________________________________

TORYCORE is hardcore; so much so that its co-creators – writer/musicians Chris Thorpe and Steve Lawson, and writer/actor Lucy Ellinson – were bumped off a BBC Scotland arts programme, on Friday, for being too blatantly anti-Tory. The idea of the 75-minute show, appearing in the Arches Behaviour festival, is to take the words of current Conservative ministers – projected on a screen, and spoken or growled by Ellinson – and hurl them at the audience together with a wall of raw, slashing live post-punk sound; the rage is palpable, the impact terrific, and the force of despair almost agonising.

The one problem, though, is that the avalanche of well-drafted Tory-speak the show presents, albeit in a hostile context, hits the audience at a time when the British media are full of little else, and when any alternative discourse is hard to find. It’s therefore not surprising that #Torycore is at its most electrifying when it adds its own voice to those of Osborne and Cameron, reading out the lists of private healthcare interests held by members of the House of Lords, or giving a long one-minute howl of rage for the death of the Edinburgh poet Paul Reekie, soon after his benefits were withdrawn. It’s my political judgment that at this stage of the game, we need more of that explicit opposition, and less of the over-optimistic assumption that mere exposure to Tory ideas will make people reject them. And where politics and art collide, political judgments have aesthetic consequences. #Torycore is a brilliant, brave idea, executed with terrific energy; but dammit, it could be even better.

ENDS ENDS