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© Joyce McMillan 2011

JOYCE MCMILLAN for The Scotsman, 17.5.13.
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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.

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

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

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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.
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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.

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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.
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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.

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

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JOYCE MCMILLAN on THE RIOT OF SPRING at the Tramway, Glasgow, for The Scotsman 11.5.13.
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3 stars ***

AFTER THE intense reflection on the current wave of sex abuse scandals that shaped Rob Drummond’s recent Traverse hit Quiz Show, I suppose he might be permitted the odd moment of artistic introspection. All the same, there is something truly mind-blowing about the strange collision between focussed political fury and sheer creative self-absorption that characterises his new show, developed as part of the current Arches/National Theatre Of Scotland Auteurs Project.

Inspired by the centenary of Stravinsky’s hugely controversial ballet The Rite Of Spring – which opened in Paris in May 1913 – Drummond’s show, created and performed by Drummond himself with dancer Robbie Synge and musician Peter Nicholson, seeks to reflect both on some themes of the ballet, including the sacrifice of the young and the frenzy of the tribe, and on the whole idea of originality in art. And perhaps unsurprisingly, the first of these two strands, linking the rage and ritual of the Rite Of Spring to the riots of 2011, and the subsequent harsh punishment of the young people involved, seems more powerful and substantial than the second.

So Drummond’s 60-minute show is at its strongest when he produces a sudden blast of fierce political poetry, or when the three men, in matching grey hoodies, create a beautifully-choreographed reflection in movement on the mood of the riots; at its weakest when it messes about with audience participation, and chats on about why the show cannot, in fact, feature any of Stravinsky’s music. The pace is sometimes dilatory, the content sometimes over-dependent on an audience of arts professionals obsessed with the minutiae of their own business. Yet there are moments when this piece soars into pure political poetry, weaving words and sound, light and movement, into a beautiful and complex cry of protest; and for those moments, the wait is well worth while.

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JOYCE MCMILLAN for The Scotsman, 10.5.13.
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READING THROUGH some old theatre reviews, I come across the one, from 1997, that records my first-ever visit to the new Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre, on London’s South Bank. The play is Henry V, Shakespeare’s most straightforwardly patriotic drama; and given the Globe Theatre’s character as a popular playhouse, designed to match the 16th century original, the audience standing in the arena are soon booing and hissing the villains, and cheering young King Harry, like a pantomime crowd in full cry.

For the French – so far as Shakespeare’s Henry V is concerned – are essentially a bunch of effete cowards, over-fond of fancy food and clothes, and distinctly effeminate. The stereotype seems strangely familiar, as I stand among the crowd; and that is because it mirrors, with great precision, the view of the English, or at any rate of the soft southern English, traditionally projected by some nationalistic Scottish writers, from John Barbour in the 14th century onwards. To form any sense of national identity at all, it seems, we have to draw boundaries, and invent distinctions between ourselves and those beyond those borders; and for Scots as for all small nations, the main distinction will always be between ourselves and our big neighbour, England.

For the English, though, the traditional enemies are the French, then the Germans; and it’s because of this mismatch of instinctive enmities, in times of stress, that the European Union – which celebrated its annual “Europe Day “ yesterday, in slightly muted style – seems likely to become an ever more significant bone of contention, as Scotland moves towards its independence referendum. As the victors of the Second World War, of course, the nations of the UK have always had less reason to cling to the idea of Europe, as a guarantor of peace and freedom, than those countries that were once defeated and occupied; for most people in Britain, the EU has been – at best – a free trade zone with a few useful political dimensions.

Now, though, the EU’s political and economic failures over the last generation – the failure to develop a genuine Europe-wide democratic culture, compounded by the historic error of opting for austerity in the face of the current recession – are coming back to haunt it; and the people of England are deciding in ever-greater numbers that they want out, often voting for UKIP to prove it. In fact, most of UKIP’s arguments about the EU are based on false assumptions. EU citizens coming to live and work in Britain contribute more to the UK’s economy than they take out, and do not, overall, either make us poorer as a nation, or “place a strain” on public services.

Facts like these, though, are no longer welcome in an Westminster political debate that has become a desperate reactionary race to the bottom, in terms of intellectual, moral and economic credibility. The Tories vie with UKIP to punish migrants and benefit claimants for a recession they did not cause, the Liberal Democrats go haplessly along with this farrago of right-wing nonsense, and even the upper echelons of the Labour Party are stuffed with people who would rather pander to xenophobic prejudice in England’s unhappy working class, than risk returning to a serious progressive politics. The sight of the Queen in her full ceremonial outfit, reading out the Coalition’s low-rent right-wing tosh to a House of Lords riddled with corporate influence, only adds to the impression of a political class that has completely lost the plot; and if it is silly to imagine that an independent Scotland would suddenly and magically be free of all the social problems that plague the UK, then it is even sillier – if possible – to imagine that the mere act of leaving the EU would do anything to free the English people from the shrill and frightening age of reaction into which they seem to be sleepwalking.

In Scotland, though, things are a little different: and not, as some would argue, because we are too busy blaming the English to bother blaming the EU. For most pragmatic Scots, the situation is more subtle; and has to do with the fact that we have become used, over the decades and centuries of the Union, to dealing comfortably with the multiple layers of political identity that make up our world. Most Scots feel that they are both Scottish and British, in a social and cultural sense; and they can therefore add a third strand of identity – as European citizens – without any visceral sense of threat.

And this is perhaps the main reason why we find ourselves, in these times of economic stress, on an island where a growing majority of English people say they want to leave the EU; while a clear majority of Scots say that they would prefer to stay in. Nor, in the short term, is there much that can be done about this growing difference of opinion; indeed as the writer and songmaker Pat Kane pointed out this week, we should be grateful, whether we support it or not, for the multi-layered and outward-looking form of civic nationaism that has evolved in Scotland since the 1970’s, and avoid the crude and dangerous mistake of equating the SNP with UKIP. Of course, there is never any room for complacency, around the politics of identity; there are plenty of Scots who find UKIP’s simple message attractive, and plenty who are prepared to project onto the image of a free Scotland the same range of reactionary fantasies that UKIP projects onto the notion of Britannia, unchained at last from the European Union.

In Scottish politics, though, there is still a sense that progressive alternatives might be possible; that the fairer, greener and more prosperous Scotland envisaged by the SNP might just be within our grasp, provided civil society can muster enough unity and creativity to make the politicians deliver on their fine words. Whereas south of the Border, progressive politics seems in full retreat, almost entirely absent from the field. And that leaves the Better Together campaign with nothing to promote but a grimly conservative fear of change; a message that the Scottish people seem – according to current polls – to be receiving loud and clear, but which may, by September next year, have become just too depressing to tolerate, any longer.

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JOYCE MCMILLAN on ALL THE SEX I EVER HAD at the Arches Theatre, Glasgow, for The Scotsman 10.5.13.
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4 stars ****

IN THE FOREGROUND, there are five little round tables, covered with photographs and mementoes; to the right, there’s a sound man, occasionally telling us what year we’ve reached. And on a raised platform a little further back, there are five good-looking people now in their late 60’s, sitting at microphones, telling us about their sex lives, in some detail; all the sex they’ve ever had, the good, the bad, the hilarious, and the ugly.

Over the last decade, reality theatre – in which the performers are just people, appearing as themselves – has become a vital part of the dramatic landscape; and although the meaning of its emergence is infinitely debatable, there’s no doubt that at its best, it can produce beautiful, shapely theatre. All The Sex I Ever Had – at the Arches this weekend as part of the Behaviour festival – is one of those shows, blasting lazy assumptions about “the elderly” by reminding us that the people who are rising 70 now were still teenagers when the Beatles released their first single, and belonged to the first generation to enjoy the sexual freedom of the 1960’s.

So there they sit, Michael, Robert, Christine, Morag and Aldo, telling their stories of childhood experimentation, teenage disasters, unintentional marriages, accidental parenthood, divorce, remarriage, internet dating, and happy self-pleasuring. The evening is breathtakingly honest, often very funny, and sometimes – perhaps too seldom – very moving; deep feelings remain a little veiled, although we can tell they are there. At the end, we’re invited to come down and meet the performers, over their little tables of memorabilia; and even though we have been watching these sexy, vibrant people for more than 90 minutes, it’s still a faint shock to see photographs of them as they were half a century ago, young, vulnerable, painfully beautiful, and waiting for life to sweep them off their feet.

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