Glue Boy Blues

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JOYCE MCMILLAN on GLUE BOY BLUES at the Tron Theatre, Glasgow, for The Scotsman 10.11.11.
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3 stars ***

THERE’S A strong, under-explored theme at the heart of Derek McLuckie’s new solo show, playing at the Tron Changing House in the last week’s of this year’s Glasgay! festival. Backed by some powerful projected graphic images, it reflects on the experience of a young gay boy who, among his many other problems – or perhaps because of them – is addicted to glue-sniffing, the drug experience of choice for kids with little money on the mean streets of Scottish towns.

For 45 minutes, McLuckie produces an extraordinary and vivid stream of consciousness, as the boy’s mind flits from the world around him into the magical realms of mythology, into imaginary conversations with his idol Judy Garland, into various different voices to match these worlds, and into memories of the evangelical Christian background he has left behind. He is abused, rejected, and treated with extraordinary ambivalence by friends who both want him, and want to reject their own homosexuality; but nothing, it seems, can stop the astonishing flights of his glue-assisted imagination.

In the end, both McLuckie’s material, and his performance style, seem a shade raw, self-conscious and unprocessed, as if still unaccustomed to the possibility of speaking out about things kept secret for so long; the show sometimes seems more like a group therapy session for gay survivors of teenage addiction than a fully developed solo play. There’s some powerful material here, though; and Pauline Goldsmith’s production sets it on the path to a vividly theatrical form of expression, in what looks like a work in progress with some distance still to travel.

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