Beowulf, Edwin Morgan’s Dreams, Grimm Tales

__________________________________________________________

JOYCE MCMILLAN on BEOWULF and EDWIN MORGAN’S DREAMS AND OTHER NIGHTMARES, at the Tron Theatre, Glasgow, and GRIMM TALES at Barlanark Community Centre, Glasgow, for The Scotsman, 28.7.1.4
__________________________________________________________

Beowulf   4 stars ****
Edwin Morgan’s Dreams And Other Nightmares  4 stars ****
Grimm’s Tales   3 stars ***

OF ALL THE creative ideas crammed into the Glasgow 2014 cultural programme, the Tron Theatre’s Home Nations season is perhaps the most quietly, brilliantly original.  It’s not only that it focusses on Scotland, England, Northern Ireland and Wales, at a time when the global reach of the Commonwealth inevitably dominates the sporting news.  It’s also that it explores the borderland between theatre and poetry, that most universal and yet most specific of art-forms; and highlights the sheer diversity and range of our main shared language, English, as it flows through the islands, and out across the world.

So it’s perhaps appropriate that the glowing, burnished centrepiece of this season is Lynne Parker’s exquisite new staging of Seamus Heaney’s 1999 version of Beowulf, a mighty Anglo-Saxon poem translated into modern English by the greatest of Northern Irish poets, and spoken by Scottish actors in what Parker – who is based in Dublin – calls a “commonwealth” of poetry and inspiration.

As a piece of theatre, the show could hardly be simpler in form; on a stage floored with loose slate, and furnished with four plain benches, three female speakers – Helen McAlpine, Lorraine McIntosh and Anita Vettesse, all magnificent in their clarity and force – look us fimly in the eye, and tell us the tale of the Danish king Hrothgar, and how his great mead-hall Heorot is attacked not once but twice by forces of almost unnameable evil, until a hero comes who believes that he can defeat this terror.

If he central idea is simple, though, there’s a huge and powerful subtlety in the detail of this production, from the division of the story among the three voices, to the quietly superb design, sound and lighting that supports the performance.  What the story of Beowulf has to say to us now – about how we fight evil and terror, and restore happiness to people ravaged by violence – is an open question.  Yet in this production the poem speaks, with a wise and mighty voice made all the greater for coming through the tongues of women; the sex who were once mainly observers of warlike violence, but who now perhaps feel the need to raise their voices, and to act.

In the main auditorium, meanwhile, the Tron’s director Andy Arnold revives Liz Lochhead’s rich and playful 2011 tribute to her predecessor as Scotland’s Makar, Edwin Morgan –  the man who famously dismissed Heaney’s version of Beowulf as “too Irish”,  by which he meant too earthbound, and not experimental enough.  In Edwin Morgan’s Dreams And Other Nightmares, Lochhead conjures up the months before Morgan’s death in 2010, when he was racked by strange dreams, which eventually became his last poems.

There are moments when Edwin Morgan’s Dreams almost seems to grind to a halt as drama, so heavily does it depend on the hesitant, bookish narrative of the character called The Biographer.  Yet David McKay’s brilliant, complex central performance as the dying poet – and his many younger selves – fairly blazes with life; and Lochhead’s tangled, passionate play succeeds where a more formally perfect drama might have failed, in capturing the inevitable doubleness, darkness, creativity and high tension of a gay Glasgow life lived mainly in the time when homosexual love was still illegal – as it still is today, in more than 40 countries of the Commonwealth.

At the Commonwealth Games opening ceremony last Wednesday, viewers across the world were invited to join in helping children whose most basic needs are still not being met; so it seems fitting that he Home Nations season also contains a children’s show – Grimm Tales, by  Theatre Iolo of Wales – that reminds us how many of our traditional fairytale stories involve episodes of shocking cruelty to young children.

At Barlanark Community Centre, on Friday, I saw Theatre Iolo perform two of their three tales, adapted by Tim Supple from the Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy’s version of Grimm’s Fairy Tales; and in both Hansel And Gretel and Ashputtle – a version of the Cinderella story – it seemed to me that Kevin Lewis’s company of three actors and one musician were a little short of material to frame and link the twin narratives, and awkwardly caught between conventional we-talk-you-listen storytelling, and two stories so familiar that the audience is all set to join in, in best  pantomime style.  There’s some delicious iive music, though, and some fine moments of pure comedy and sheer horror; as actors and audience together face the universal truth that children are not always loved and cherished, and that sometimes they need both a touch of magic and all their own strength, to fight their way to a better life.

All three shows now at the Tron Theatre; Beowulf and Edwin Morgan’s Dreama until 2 August, Grimm Tales until 1 August.

ENDS ENDS

__________________________________________________________

JOYCE MCMILLAN on BEOWULF and EDWIN MORGAN’S DREAMS AND OTHER NIGHTMARES, at the Tron Theatre, Glasgow, and GRIMM TALES at Barlanark Community Centre, Glasgow, for The Scotsman, 28.7.1.4
__________________________________________________________

Beowulf   4 stars ****
Edwin Morgan’s Dreams And Other Nightmares  4 stars ****
Grimm’s Tales   3 stars ***

OF ALL THE creative ideas crammed into the Glasgow 2014 cultural programme, the Tron Theatre’s Home Nations season is perhaps the most quietly, brilliantly original.  It’s not only that it focusses on Scotland, England, Northern Ireland and Wales, at a time when the global reach of the Commonwealth inevitably dominates the sporting news.  It’s also that it explores the borderland between theatre and poetry, that most universal and yet most specific of art-forms; and highlights the sheer diversity and range of our main shared language, English, as it flows through the islands, and out across the world.

So it’s perhaps appropriate that the glowing, burnished centrepiece of this season is Lynne Parker’s exquisite new staging of Seamus Heaney’s 1999 version of Beowulf, a mighty Anglo-Saxon poem translated into modern English by the greatest of Northern Irish poets, and spoken by Scottish actors in what Parker – who is based in Dublin – calls a “commonwealth” of poetry and inspiration.

As a piece of theatre, the show could hardly be simpler in form; on a stage floored with loose slate, and furnished with four plain benches, three female speakers – Helen McAlpine, Lorraine McIntosh and Anita Vettesse, all magnificent in their clarity and force – look us fimly in the eye, and tell us the tale of the Danish king Hrothgar, and how his great mead-hall Heorot is attacked not once but twice by forces of almost unnameable evil, until a hero comes who believes that he can defeat this terror.

If he central idea is simple, though, there’s a huge and powerful subtlety in the detail of this production, from the division of the story among the three voices, to the quietly superb design, sound and lighting that supports the performance.  What the story of Beowulf has to say to us now – about how we fight evil and terror, and restore happiness to people ravaged by violence – is an open question.  Yet in this production the poem speaks, with a wise and mighty voice made all the greater for coming through the tongues of women; the sex who were once mainly observers of warlike violence, but who now perhaps feel the need to raise their voices, and to act.

In the main auditorium, meanwhile, the Tron’s director Andy Arnold revives Liz Lochhead’s rich and playful 2011 tribute to her predecessor as Scotland’s Makar, Edwin Morgan –  the man who famously dismissed Heaney’s version of Beowulf as “too Irish”,  by which he meant too earthbound, and not experimental enough.  In Edwin Morgan’s Dreams And Other Nightmares, Lochhead conjures up the months before Morgan’s death in 2010, when he was racked by strange dreams, which eventually became his last poems.

There are moments when Edwin Morgan’s Dreams almost seems to grind to a halt as drama, so heavily does it depend on the hesitant, bookish narrative of the character called The Biographer.  Yet David McKay’s brilliant, complex central performance as the dying poet – and his many younger selves – fairly blazes with life; and Lochhead’s tangled, passionate play succeeds where a more formally perfect drama might have failed, in capturing the inevitable doubleness, darkness, creativity and high tension of a gay Glasgow life lived mainly in the time when homosexual love was still illegal – as it still is today, in more than 40 countries of the Commonwealth.

At the Commonwealth Games opening ceremony last Wednesday, viewers across the world were invited to join in helping children whose most basic needs are still not being met; so it seems fitting that he Home Nations season also contains a children’s show – Grimm Tales, by  Theatre Iolo of Wales – that reminds us how many of our traditional fairytale stories involve episodes of shocking cruelty to young children.

At Barlanark Community Centre, on Friday, I saw Theatre Iolo perform two of their three tales, adapted by Tim Supple from the Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy’s version of Grimm’s Fairy Tales; and in both Hansel And Gretel and Ashputtle – a version of the Cinderella story – it seemed to me that Kevin Lewis’s company of three actors and one musician were a little short of material to frame and link the twin narratives, and awkwardly caught between conventional we-talk-you-listen storytelling, and two stories so familiar that the audience is all set to join in, in best  pantomime style.  There’s some delicious iive music, though, and some fine moments of pure comedy and sheer horror; as actors and audience together face the universal truth that children are not always loved and cherished, and that sometimes they need both a touch of magic and all their own strength, to fight their way to a better life.

All three shows now at the Tron Theatre; Beowulf and Edwin Morgan’s Dreama until 2 August, Grimm Tales until 1 August.

ENDS ENDS

Advertisement

Now’s The Hour: The First Minister’s Visit To The Scottish Youth Theatre, And The Relationship Between Politics And Art

_________________________________________________________

JOYCE MCMILLAN on NOW’S THE HOUR… for the Scotsman Magazine, 26.7.14. _________________________________________________________

CULTURE AND POLITICS often make uneasy bedfellows; so it was in slightly apprehensive mood that I set out, last week, to watch the First Minister pay an official visit to the Scottish Youth Theatre, at its headquarters in Glasgow’s Merchant City. The occasion was two-fold; the First Minister would see both a brief performance by the Tin Forest International Performing Company – a group of young people from across the Commonwealth taking part in this huge Glasgow 2014 community project – and an extract from the SYT’s forthcoming Edinburgh Fringe show, Now’s The Hour, in which young people voting for the first time face up to Scotland’s big day of decision.

As it turned out, I needn’t have worried on this occasion, either about the politics or about the art. The short Tin Forest dance piece was impressive, the First Minister was in genial form; and the extract from Now’s The Hour reduced him and almost everyone else to tears, not because the show takes any particular view on the referendum debate – it is strictly neutral – but because of the bright, achingly hopeful faces of the twelve young people in the cast, as they posted humblingly wise letters to their future selves into a giant ballot box.

So far, so good, in other words; but there’s no point in pretending that the coming referendum doesn’t raise serious questions about how arts and politics should interact, in a 21st century democracy. On the “yes” side, there’s plenty of creative excitement around the idea of possible future Scotlands; but also a sense that this is more of a time for cabaret, debate, and brilliant fragments, rather than sustained long-form work “about” the referendum. And on the “no”side, there is much concern about the future of the dense network of UK connections in areas like classical music and literary publishing; along with a genuine if as yet unjustified apprehension that in or out of the UK, Scotland’s SNP-dominated government is bound, in the end, to start favouring artists who share its political perspective.

Scotland’s current situation, in other words, throws a sharp light on the fact that in any political situation, the price of artistic freedom is eternal vigilance. If there are relatively few “big plays” about the independence debate on this year’s Fringe, that only serves to remind us that art necessarily moves to a very different rhythm from politics, often decades in advance when it comes to imagining new cultural identities and possibilities, many years behind in responding fully and deeply to sudden change.

And when it comes to protecting artists from politicians and their demands, that remains a vital task for arts funding bodies, for the media, and for artists’ themselves; all of whom need to be aware not only of explicit pressures to take political sides, but also of the more subtle pressures that pervade our PR-driven world – to join in the business of hype and image-making rather than asking tough questions, to celebrate rather than interrogate, and to be co-opted to an ethos of global marketing that presents itself as apolitical, but which can nonetheless, like any ideology, become an enemy of truth, and of real creative freedom.

ENDS ENDS

The Tin Forest, Endurance, News Just In

__________________________________________________________

JOYCE MCMILLAN on THE TIN FOREST at the South Rotunda, Glasgow, ENDURANCE at the Arches, Glasgow, and NEWS JUST IN at the Arches, Glasgow, for The Scotsman, 26.7.14.
__________________________________________________________

The Tin Forest 4 stars ****
Endurance 3 stars ***
News Just In 2 stars **

IT BEGINS with a scene of devastation and bleakness. “There was a once a wide, windswept place, near nowhere and close to forgotten,” says the opening sentence of Helen Ward and Wayne Anderson’s much-loved children’s book The Tin Forest, “that was filled with all the things that no-one wanted.” The story goes on to tell how the old man who lives in the middle of wasteland starts to build a forest out of the junk around him, and about the magic that brings the forest to life; and it must be more than half a decade, now, since the former National Theatre of Scotland director Vicky Featherstone first began to wonder whether this story might work as a metaphor for some aspects of Glasgow’s story, over the last 30 years.

So it’s strangely – almost uncannily – fitting that the NTS’s huge Tin Forest project has reached its climax in this strange and glorious week for Glasgow, with the Commonwealth Games in full swing, and the new riverside city around the main project venue at the South Rotunda glittering in tropical sunshine. The climactic “puppet theatre experience” itself – directed and designed by the NTS’s Graham McLaren – is both slightly flawed, and immensely beautiful. In groups of six or seven, the audience is led into the labyrinthine lower level of the Rotunda, where we walk through a series of scenes – all with a faint atmosphere of the late-Victorian period when the Clyde tunnel Rotundas were built – that draw us into the story of the old man, represented by a superb puppet-figure. We enter his little house with its bleak view of the wasteland, we see the workshop where he struggles to build a bird that will fly, we pass through a little series of fairground-style story-tableaux, and we reach the moment when the little house is suddenly surrounded by seething new green life.

And at that point, the show seems to run out of inspiration; instead of coming up into the main space of the rotunda to find some lush and thrilling Dear Green Place, we see a pallid projected view of the Hebrides, and the Tin Forest team of musicians – ledy by Annie Grace and Gav Prentice – singing and chatting their way through a familiar programme of Glasgow songs put together by musical director Michael John McCarthy. The music needs sharper direction, the visual imagery doesn’t match the story. Yet even with this less-than-intense conclusion, The Tin Forest remains a memorable experience, in a remarkable buiding; the last piece in the jigsaw, perhaps, for Glasgow’s long story of post-industrial regeneration.

In a city full of Games-related cultural events, meanwhile, the Arches’ show Endurance stands out for the sheer strength of its raw and heartfelt commitment to its subject. Created by The Women’s Creative Company and A Moment’s Peace, the show brings together a comunity company of 17 women performer-researchers, who bring us the history of women’s participation in the Commonwealth Games. In a sense, this 80-minute show feels both too long for the single powerful message it conveys about negative and sexist attitudes to women in sport, and too short to tell us the full story of the many fascinating and impressive women it mentions. Yet the energy, poise, passion and occasional anger of the women is unforgettable; and deeply impressive.

Later in the evening at the Arches, a huge and glittering team of writers and performers are involved in the creation of News Just In, a show which aims to provide a freshly-written satirical perspective on the whole business of Glasgow 2014 every night from now until 2 August. The show is played out on the sparking green-and purple set of an angst-ridden Scottish current affairs television show called Tartan Tonight, and features some impressively lurid design by Lisa Sangster, as well as a potentiaily riveting pair of lead performances from Jordan Young and Julie Brown as the show’s two daggers-drawn presenters.

What we mainly learned from the opening News Just In show, though, is that none of this matters if you don’t have a real satirical writer on the strength. As principal writer for the first episode, all the exceptionally gifted Johnny McKnight seemed able to serve up was a few tired jokes about the television industry, larded with a strain of unfunny obscenity that made me gasp at its sheer ugly pointlessness. News Just In will be a better show on other nights, of course. Yet satire is a special skill; and with vital political jokery like Lady Alba’s Bad Romance circulating on the internet, Scottish theatre needs to raise its satirical game well above this level, and fast.

Shows seen on 24 August, 24 August and 22 August.

ENDS ENDS

Kitsch, Tat And True Creative Talent: Mixed Messages From The Common Wealth Games Opening Ceremony Run Deeper Than Yes-No Debate – Column 25.7.14.

______________________________________

JOYCE MCMILLAN for The Scotsman 27.6.14.
______________________________________

TO PITLOCHRY, on Wednesday afternoon, to see a new production of Stephen Greenhorn’s play Passing Places, about two young neds from Motherwell on the run from their native central belt, gradually learning – on the long road to Thurso – to recognise the many different faces of the country they call home. Greenhorn’s play contains a brilliant passage in which one of the boys, Alex, is invited by a new-age woman he meets along the way to describe the West Highland scenery as”beautiful”; but he just can’t do it. “It’s not,” he says, “a word in my language.”

And I thought of young Alex again, on Wednesday night, as I watched the strange, funny, tangled, contradictory, embarrassing, touching and thriling thing that was the Opening Ceremony of the Commonwealth Games in Glasgow; for although the word “beautiful” is probably now heard more often in Scotland than it was 20 years ago, the ceremony suggested that Scotland’s relationship with the thing itself – beauty – is still a complicated work-in-progress. It took exactly two hours and ten minutes for something unambiguously beautiful to appear at Parkhead on Wednesday night; and to judge by the buzz on social media, I wasn’t the only one to notice something shift and intensify in the air around Celtic Park and across Scotland, at the moment just after 11 o’clock when Nicola Benedetti appeared on stage, and began to play an inspired and exquisite violin arrangement of the Bonnie, Bonnie Banks Of Loch Lomond.

Before that, there had been the long, joyful, noisy parade of the nations, complete with wee scottie-dogs in team jackets, wild cheering, and huge light-shows sweeping across the stadium’s giant screen. And in the first hour of the ceremony, there was that mind-blowing Glasgow explosion of wild cultural self-mockery, open-hearted welcome, sheer generosity of spirit, and eye-popping visual garishness, that left mouths agape across the planet with its combination of shouting celebrities, dancing Tunnocks Tea Cakes, miniaturised scale models of the Forth Bridge and the Finnieston Crane, and hundreds of ordinary Glaswegians – old and young, fat and slim, black and white – bopping and twirling around the stadium in dazzling playschool colours, in a pattern of simple but tightly-choreographed movement.

That some aspects of this sequence worked bette than others almost goes without saying. The generosity of the ceremony’s fund-raising link-up with UNICEF was inspired, and made space for some serious information about the problems faced by children in many parts of the Commonwealth. The celebs – live and filmed – by and large performed well, with John Barrowman striking a blow for gay rights across the Commonwealth by planting a kiss full on the lips of a young male dancer, Ewan MacGregor fronting the UNICEF appeal in fine style, and Billy Connolly remembering the great moment when Nelson Mandela came to Glasgow to receive the Freedom Of The City; although the heavy dependence on expat celebrities like Rod Stewart to headline the event suggested that Scotland’s cultural cringe may still be alive and well in some quarters. And the idea of including ordinary citizens in the ceremony often worked well; there were moments, both in the stadium and on film, that did capture a sense that “people make Glasgow,” that this is a city of and for ordinary people, not smooth and well-groomed elites.

Yet until that moment when Nicola Benedetti finally appeared on stage – raising the game, intensifying the effort, aspiring to something a little beyond open-hearted fun – the ceremony strkingly lacked beauty, or indeed any sense of stillness and grace; it looked busy, energetic, slightly frenzied, and – in its palette of sound and imagery – often quite Disneyfied and child-like, a wide-eyed mix of nursery colours, cute cultural icons, and lovable little dogs. Speaking to a Commonwealth-related business conference in Glasgow on Tuesday, the First Minister promised a games free of explicit politics around the current referendum campaign; and it’s easy to guess how well any explicit yes-no campaigning would have gone down with the crowd at Parkhead on Wednesday night.

Yet the ceremony itself came as a sharp reminder of how closely culture and politics are entwined, and how every cultural representation we create of ourselves – as nations, as cities, as men or women, or as members of this or that minority or interest-group – carries profound political messages about who we think we are, and who we would like to be. What Wednesday’s opening ceremony said to the world was that Glasgow – and Scotland – is a place with a sense of humour, that knows how not to take itself too seriously; that it’s a tolerant place, a warm-hearted place, and a place plugged into the tropes and images global popular culture, like everywhere else.

It also, though, risked making Glasgow look – quite wrongly – like a place with no discrimination and no taste, desperately vulnerable to any heavily-marketed tat that global culture-makers may choose to throw at it. And it wasn’t untl the final half-hour of the ceremony- when Nicola played, and Billy Connolly spoke, and the wonderful South African soprano Pumeza Matshikiza sang a sweet and powerful version of Hamish Henderson’s Freedom Come All Ye – that we began to glimpse the real creative strength behind the big smiles and fluorescent colours, the sheer weight of creative endeavour that has helped to change and deepen Scotland’s collective life over the last two generations, and the popular passion for great art presented with unsurpassed skill that has made Glasgow such a vital centre both for the visual arts, and the home of almost all of Scotland’s great performing companies, from Scottish Opera and the RSNO to the National Of Theatre Of Scotland.

It is impossible, in other words, entirely to disentangle politics from art; art speaks to communities of people about themselves and their shared life, and politics reflects that same life in different ways. If artists are to fulfil their true creative role, though, they have to be free to pursue what is difficult, and complex, and grown-up, and beautiful, in their art-form; they have to be free to change and silence people with their work, and to create new points of balance and joy never imagined before.

And as the opening ceremony so vividly demonstrated, for both better and worse, the main danger stalking our culture in the west now has less to do with politicians demanding support for specific policies; and more to do with pervasive and often patronising marketing-led assumptions that associate popular culture with the obvious, the crass, the childish and the garish. In the Glasgow I know, the tradition has always been subtly different from that; it’s about a city of rebellious thinkers and discerning amateurs, which has always insisted that the best is for everyone, whether it’s the Mahabharata at the Tramway, or Pavarotti singing at the SECC, or the magnificent musicianship of Nicola Benedetti. On Wednesday night, the messages were memorably mixed, sometimes even confusing. Yet they were complex enough to allow for hope that Glasgow will continue to change and flourish, not least by never giving up on the demanding quest for the beauty that is truth, and that finally sets everyone free.

ENDS ENDS

Henry IV and Henry V

__________________________________________________________

JOYCE MCMILLAN on HENRY IV and HENRY V at the Botanic Gardens, Glasgow, for The Scotsman 21.7.14.
__________________________________________________________

Henry IV  4 stars ****
Henry V  3  stars ***

NIGHT FALLS on the Kibble Palace; and against its interior backdrop of elegant pillars and palm trees, a slim young man undergoes his necessary transition from hard-drinking Eastcheap hellraiser to warrior, monarch, and representative of God on earth.

Shakespeare’s twin Henry IV plays – now condensed into a single, intense two-and-a-half-hour evening by Bard In The Botanics director Gordon Barr – and their sequel Henry V, presented outside in the gardens in an ambitious three-hour production by Jennifer Dick, are perhaps the greatest dramas ever-written about nation-building and leadership in a pre-democratic age.  Written some fifty years after Sir David Lindsay’s great Satire Of The Three Estates, Shakespeare’s plays contain none of Lindsay’s soul-searching about the place of the common people in the nation’s counsels.

Yet elsewhere, their concerns are strikingly similar.  Both playwrights imagine a young monarch led astray by sensual pleasures, who has to find his way back to virtue; and in Gordon Barr’s ingenious and impressive three-handed version, the story of young Prince Hal’s emergence as king is told through a tight focus on the relationship between Hal and his two father-figures, the tormented and conscience-stricken King Henry IV – who usurped the crown from Richard II – and the Eastcheap drunkard and blowhard, the immensely fat Sir John Falstaff.  Barr’s version benefits from a fine, beautifully spoken performance from James Ronan as Hal, and a deeply moving and brilliantly insightful double turn from Kirk Bage as both Henry IV and Falstaff, two contrasting yet somehow entwined aspects of the English psyche; and they receive impressive support from Tom Duncan as all the other characters, including Hal’s great rival and alter ego, the young Northumbrian Harry Hotspur.

Jennifer Dick’s staging of Henry V, by contrast, is both more ambitious and more diffuse, a huge pageant of a show in which members of the main company are joined by almost a dozen additional actors from the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland to create a spectacular large-scale staging of Shakespeare’s great battle-cry of a play, about Henry V’s great victory over France at Agincourt.  Dick’s central idea – linked to the current commemorations of 1914 – is to frame the performance of Henry V as part of a speech day at a Glasgow school in 1915; so the makeshift mediaeval costumes often slip away, to reveal the nurses’ capes and khaki uniforms of those who marched away in 1914.

What emerges is an evening of tremendously vivid images and set-pieces, punctuated by a near-full-length performance of Shakespeare’s text that often seems overwhelmed both by the sher weight of the speeches, and by the strange patriotic mixture of exhilaration and revulsion with which this play views the savagery of war.  The show boasts a passionate, unruly Hal in Daniel Campbell, though, and a gorgeous Princess Catherine in Amandine Vincent.  And there are moments – notably the long two minutes’ silence in which the cast mourn the dead of Agincourt – that burn in the memory; and touch the very essence of this mighty and terrible national pageant of a play.

Botanic Gardens, Glasgow, until 2 August.

ENDS ENDS

Children’s Theatre Matters

_________________________________________________________

JOYCE MCMILLAN on CHILDREN’S THEATRE – MOVING ON, ASKING NEW QUESTIONS for Scotsman Magazine, 19.7.14.  _______________________________________________________

IN THE GARDEN at East Kilbride Arts Centre, there’s a little open-air theatre arena scooped out of a grassy slope; and on a sunny Saturday lunchtime, there’s a bright old-fashioned ice-cream van parked in the performance space.  The chimes strike up, three performers in stripey waistcoats and straw boaters start to talk about ice-cream, and the happy times associated with it; and before long, we’re all drawn into The Pokey Hat, the latest show by up-and-coming chldren’s theatre company Grinagog, based in Glasgow, and now on tour across Scotland.

In fact, the audience Grinagog has attracted today contains relatively few young children; there are a dozen cheerful-looking teenagers, and a posse of older ladies from a local care home, hugely appreciative of the show’s gentle way with happy memories.  The sheer confidence and poise of the short show, though, makes it a fine piece of entertainment for any audience.  And it confirms Grinagog’s increasingly important place in a Scottish children’s theatre scene that has developed by leaps and bounds over the last two decades, under the international influence of Edinburgh’s Imaginate Festival; so that today, Scottish-based companies and artists like Catherine Wheels, Vanishing Point, Wee Stories, Andy Manley, and inspired puppet artist Shona Reppe, have whole global networks of their own, and back-catalogues of world-class work for children and young people, including Manley and Reppe’s terrific installation piece Huff, which is set to reappear at the Traverse during this year’s Edinburgh Festival. 

With growing confidence, though, comes a whole new set of questions about the status and role of children’s theatre; and this week there were two powerful blasts of the trumpet from south of the border, where children’s companies have been undergoing a similar evolution.  David Wood, the veteran adaptor  of children’s stories for the stage, told the Guardian that children’s theatre was simply “the most important theatre”, because of its role in stimulating imagination, and its absolute obligation to produce work of the highest quality; there’s no right to fail in children’s theatre, he argues, since one bad show can drive young theatregoers away for ever.  And Purni Morell, artistic director of London’s legendary Unicorn Theatre, gave an interview to the website A Younger Theatre, arguing for children’s theatre that is seen as important in its own right, and not as a “training opportunity”; children, she argues, should be entertained and enthralled in the now, and not treated as people who are just preparing to be something else.

And although it’s possible to argue with parts of both statements, it’s thrilling to hear two leading practitioners of children’s theatre begin to challenge some of the patronising and instrumentalising attitudes that often emerge in discussions about the funding of children’s theatre.  In his feisty interview, Wood is particularly scathing about the idea that children’s theatre matters because “it builds audiences for the future”, an inward-looking theatre-industry argument that he sees as irrelevant; Morell is clearly exasperated by the idea of children’s theatre as a form of social do-gooding, providing useful education and information for  a group who have special needs when it comes to theatrical entertainment. 

It’s not true, of course, that children’s theatre is “the most important”; if serious theatre has a close historical connection with the very fact of citizenship, and the complex decisions citizenship entails, then it probably functions most powerfully with audiences who are old enough to take on those adult  responsibilities in full.  Yet children’s theatre is a vital part of our creative life, and one to which the British – as Purni Morrell forcefully argues – have long had an attitude that ranges from the forgetful to the patronising.  And if makers of theatre for children are willing to lead the charge against the reductive idea that theatre should exist mainly as a social service to the young, vulnerable or marginalised, then the vast majority of those who care for the future of theatre in these islands will be backing them, every inch of the way.

ENDS ENDS       

Yellow Valley

__________________________

JOYCE MCMILLAN  on YELLOW VALLEY at Rutherglen Town Hall, Glasgow, for The Scotsman, 19.7.14.
_________________________

3 stars ***

IT’S A HOT AND STEAMY summer afternoon at Rutherglen Town Hall; just the right atmosphere, in fact, for this latest show from the Edinburgh-based company Starcatchers, who specialise in theatre for the under-5’s.  Co-created by director Xana Marwick  and musician-performers Drew Wright and Dougie Hudson, Yellow Valley tells the story of a little African girl called Kendiwe, and her quest to find out what exactly is happening at a special place along the winding river, where another voice repeats every word she shouts out.   Neither the cow nor the goat can help, and neither can her pet dog; and in the end it takes granny Choo-Choo to sort everything out.

As narratives go, it’s a little on the thin side, even for an audience of 2-3 year olds; a slightly meatier tale, more briskly told, might have exerted a tighter grip on the attention of the tiny tots lolling and squirming on cushions on the floor.  What Yellow Valley has by the truckload, though, is gorgeous sound and music, delivered by Wright and Hudson on a fascinating range of acoustic instruments, from guitar to traditional West African balon.  The story may be sketchy, in other words, but the performance is delightful; and at the end, at least half of the tots got up and danced with a will, having the time of their lives.

Seen on 18 July, on tour in Glasgow until 3 August.

ENDS ENDS

Under Milk Wood

__________________________

JOYCE MCMILLAN  on UNDER MILK WOOD at the Tron Theatre, Glasgow, for The Scotsman, 19.7.14.
_________________________

4 stars ****

DO THEY STILL exist, little, buttoned-up, Bible-bashing British towns like the fictional Llaregyb, celebrated in Dylan Thomas’s great 1954 dramatic poem?  Perhaps not; but the sheer strength and resonance of Gareth Nicholls’s multi-voiced staging of Under Milk Wood, presented by the Tron Community Company to launch the theatre’s Home Nations season for Glasgow 2014, suggests that Scotland still has powerful folk-memories of places where most women were either ageing battle-axes or “no better than they should be”, and most men were either henpecked, or up to no good.

On a gorgeous, light-touch public bar set by Charlotte Lane, Linda Radley’s powerful one-hour adaptation of the play  – presented by three young narrators, 13 other actors, and a 3-piece band – leads us through the high points of the 24-hour cycle evoked in Thomas’s poem, drawing out fine performances from Chris Bogle as old Captain Cat, Anthony Byrne as the Reverend Eli Jenkins, and Jacqueline Thain and Stephanie Pollock as the town’s two “wicked women”, Polly Garter and Rosie Probert.  There are also  some glorious songs by Michael John McCarthy.

In the end, though, the success of a multiple-voice version of Under Milk Wood depends almost entirely on the pace and co-ordination of the performance, and the clarity of the verse speaking.  And here, the young Tron company do their writer and director proud; in accents that may not be Welsh, but that still often capture the sheer compelling magic of one of the greatest verse dramas ever written in these islands.

Seen on 17 July, final performance 20 July.

ENDS ENDS             

The Admirable Crichton

________________________________________________________

JOYCE MCMILLAN on THE ADMIRABLE CRICHTON at Pitlochry Festival Theatre, for The Scotsman, 19.7.14.
_________________________________________________________

4 stars ****

WHATEVER ELSE HE was, the great Scottish playwright J. M. Barrie was no revolutionary.  Born in Kirriemuir in 1860 into a poor weaving family, he enjoyed an astonishing career in London journalism and letters, rising to the heights of the British establishment, and becoming – in real terms – one of the wealthiest writers in history.

Yet Barrie was also a fine writer, with an uncomfortable eye for the truth.  In his great 1902 satire The Admirable Crichton, he demolishes the class assumptions on which polite Edwardian society was based with a boldness that exposes present-day costume dramas like Downton Abbey for the timid establishment propaganda they are.  And in this memorably handsome and thoughtful Pitlochry production by Richard Baron, the radicalism of the play is emphasised by the simple device of placing Barrie the playwright on stage, viewing the characters with a kindly eye, recounting his own detailed stage directions.  The effect is to put us at a perfect reflective distance from the action; and also, finally, to let us see Barrie’s sense of shock at the extent of the human tragedy he has exposed.

So here – in a play that might have been designed to bring out the best in John Durnin’s current Pitlochry company – we have the conventional opening scenes in an aristocratic London drawing-room, where the eccentric old Earl of Loam is planning a round-the-world yacht trip.  We have the two scenes following the party’s shipwreck on a Pacific island, during which the butler Crichton steadily emerges as the natural leader of the group, and the likely partner of Lord Loam’s splendid eldest daughter, Lady Mary; followed by the final scene, the return to a “civilisation” that aggrandises the cowardly and stupid, allows them to control the narrative on the basis of their birth, robs Mary of her worthy partner, and leaves Crichton no longer able to accept his place as a servant.

Barrie’s play contains some disturbing elements; 21st century audiences know all too much about what became of the early 20th century’s interest in “natural” leaders, and benign dictatorship.  In an age when the British class system sadly seems more entrenched than a generation ago, though, this is a timely and immensely worthwhile production, graced with two fine leading performances from Dougal Lee as Crichton and Helen Mallon as Lady Mary; and by an excellent Alan Steele as Barrie himself, disturbed and shaken by the truth his deft dramatic structure has brought to light.

Seen on 9 July, in repertoire until 15 October.  

ENDS ENDS

Profound Failure To Listen Makes “No” Campaign A Content-Free Zone – Column 18.7.14.

_______________________________________

JOYCE MCMILLAN for The Scotsman 18.7.14.
_______________________________________

LET’S BEGIN, THIS WEEK, with three cameo moments from the current referendum campaign. The first involves a session at the City Of London Festival, two weeks ago, at which I and three other speakers tried to lay some of the issues before a smallish audience of City residents and workers; the scene was a marquee shaped like a bowler hat, in Paternoster Square. I suggested that many Scots formerly loyal to the Labour Party were being drawn towards a “yes” vote partly because of increasingly negative attitudes at Westminster to the welfare state, the “sharing” project that was supposed to give the Union meaning in a post-imperial age; a woman in the audience expressed shock that anyone would contemplate ending a 300-year Union over such “little policy matters”.

The second involves a story published yesterday in the Daily Telegraph, about English athletes seeking advice on what to do when they are booed by Scottish supporters at the Commonwealth Games in Glasgow – an as yet completely imaginary event which they, or the Telegraph, seem to consider almost inevitable, given that the referendum is, in their view, all about “anti-English feeling”.

And then lastly, there is the Let’s Stay Together video released yesterday by the Better Together campaign, in which a wide range of UK celebrities – some Scottish, some not – declare that the UK is a family of nations, and that they do not want Scotland to “leave”. Now this is a pleasant video, apparently overseen by Better Together’s new PR advisors Saatchi & Saatchi, and commendably free of the scaremongering normally associated with the No campaign.

To say that it lacks political content, though, is to understate the case; it is a policy-free zone, and apart from a fleeting reference to the camaraderie of British troops in Afghanistan, features nothing but a vague expression of the feeling that Scotland-as-part-of-Britain is important to the identity of those speaking. One of the speakers even talks about Scotland’s arts festivals, as if these huge international events would suddenly become inaccessible to her in after a “yes” vote; at which point, it really becomes difficult not to feel insulted by the lameness of the case being put forward.

For what all of these response to the debate have in common is this: a profound failure to listen, and to consider how and why Scotland has arrived at its current point of decision. The audience member in the City of London sees the huge rightward shift of Westminster politics over the past generation as a “little policy matter”, and fails to understand that for Scotland, the Union has always been conditional on its ability to deliver real gains, in terms of freedom, opportunity and justice. The Telegraph story simply assumes that the “Yes” campaign is about anti-English feeling, when in fact at every official level, its overwhelmingly positive tone in promoting the idea of a progressive and inclusive Scotland provides the most effective antidote I have yet seen to Scotland’s old whining backbeat of anti-English complaint.

And the “Let’s Stay Together” film – well, to return briefly to the overused divorce metaphor, it reminds me of a spouse who tries to get his partner to stay by handing her an “I Love You This Much” teddy-bear, while singing loudly and sticking his fingers in his ears whenever she tries to expain that she does not like the lifestyle he has chosen for the family, that she wants to live differently in a different place, and that she has just undergone an intensive course in economics and energy policy, the better to understand the options open to her.

Now of course, none of this extraordinary inability to hear what is going on in Scottish politics means that the “No” campaign will lose the vote on 18 September; most Scottish voters, after all, receive the bulk of their political information from sources that generally share Better Together’s negative assumptions about the case for a “Yes” vote.

It does, though, have two important meanings that will continue to reverberate through Scottish politics, after 18 September.
First, it alerts us to the likelihood that having failed to hear or recognise the real reasons for Scotland’s restlessness even during the referendum campaign, the “No” camp will certainly pay no attention to them in the aftermath of a referendum victory. At best, we may be offered a few extra tax-raising powers, at precisely the moment when the austerity trap bites hardest; at worst, we will slide off the Westminster agenda completely for another decade or two.

And secondly, those who have been involved in the campaign on the ground, and who have glimpsed the mood, range and energy of the ideas generated by the “Yes” movement, are not likely to forget the political education they have experienced, or the sheer exhilaration of seeing people reach a moment when they are no longer prepared to defer, to remain silent, or to put up with being unheard.

So as 18 September approaches – just two months from today – I would say this to all of Scotland’s traditional power-holders, from the landowners and big commercial interests to the mainstream politicians, local councillors and senior public servants; that you almost certainly have no idea, as yet, of the positive forces that have been unleashed in Scotland by this campaign, of their irreverence, their confidence, their inventiveness, and their determination – whatever the referendum outcome – to work at grassroots level to unleash more of this county’s magnificent potential.

They are the kinds of forces that are notoriously inconvenient to the powers that be; they want change, localisation, a genuine redistribution of power. And on 19 September, they will still be there. They will be bruised, perhaps, if they do not get the result that most of those involved want. Yet they will still be moved by the kind of vision of a better future that is now lamentably lacking in mainstream UK politics. And they will still be able to draw on the campaigning strength that vision provides; while all the mainstream parties about them sink further into a culture of grey-faced managerialism and sheer political cowardice, in the face of the massive and urgent challenges that confront us now, and will only grow sharper, as the century rolls on.

ENDS ENDS