Arches Live! 2012 (3) The Robinson Family Undercover Secret Agents, The Miss Kitty Show, L’Eveil
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JOYCE MCMILLAN on ARCHES LIVE ! 2012 (3) at the Arches Theatre, Glasgow, for The Scotsman 27.9.12
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Robinson Family Undercover Secret Agents 3 stars ***
The Miss Kitty Show 3 stars ***
L’Eveil 3 stars ***
IF THE SHOWS in this year’s Arches Live! festival are any guide, both the personal and the political loom large in the work of the current generation of emerging artists; it’s just that sometimes, there are boundary issues about the relationship between the two. Ian Nulty’s Robinson Family Undercover Secret Agents starts in chilling political style, with a screen display of some of the sickening anti-Obama propaganda produced by the American far right; both racist and Islamophobic, it sets the scene for some powerful sequences in which Nulty – as his right-wing alter ego Robert Robinson – indulges in real-time, real-life Facebook chat with America’s huge army of right-wing Christians, ranting on about the Rapture, and their hopes for an imminent war on Iran.
Nulty’s problem, though, is that he can’t resist combining this hair-raising political expose with some showy and awkward provocations about his life as a gay man in Britain. And the sense of confusion created by this shifting focus makes Catriona Ruth Paterson’s much shorter Miss Kitty Show – a spectacularly-styled work-in-progress collision between the ideal-housewife aesthetic of the 1950’s, and the brutal demands for perfection still inflicted on young women today – look like a more coherent account of the interface between the personal and the political, despite an embryonic script, and slightly hesitant performance.
As for Mona Kastell’s L’Eveil, it’s billed as a “costume-led” show, and its solo performer Mazz Marsden does indeed wear a remarkable, chrysalis-like hemp costume, as she dances her way through something like the emergence of a dragon-fly, and its first stretaching of its wings. The content, though, doesn’t amount to much more than a familiar series of movement-theatre cliches about birth, hatching, the life-cycle; attractive to look at, particularly when the light shimmers through the rough fabric, but not original enough to linger long in the mind.
ENDS ENDS
Joyce McMillan is theatre critic of 
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