Mystic McMillan Predicts: Scotland’s Theatre Year, 2015

_______________________________________________________

JOYCE MCMILLAN on SCOTTISH THEATRE IN 2015: MYSTIC MCMILLAN PREDICTS for  the Scotsman Magazine, 27.12.14. _______________________________________________________

JANUARY

AS 2015 DAWNS, the crystal ball is barely less cloudy than it was at the start of 2014.  Scotland is still in the UK, but the UK is in an uproar over the approaching general election; and Scottish public life remains in a state of high excitement so dramatic that theatre sometimes seems to have little to add to the conversation, beyond the occasional brilliant twitter fragment from David Greig.

Change is afoot, though, in the field of arts funding.  Not only has Creative Scotland announced its first round of regular three-year funding, bringing joy to some and grief to others; but theatre companies across Scotland have noted the success of the Scottish Youth Theatre in defying an adverse Creative Scotland decision by winning direct funding from the Scottish Government, after a successful visit by the former First Minister to their 2014 show Now’s The Hour.

So as the spring season blinks into life, audiences increasingly find their theatres stuffed with squads of politicians, invited by theatre companies keen to impress.  At the Royal Lyceum premiere of Faith Healer, by the great Irish playwright Brian Friel, a fight breaks out in the stalls between bag-carriers for First Minister Nicola Sturgeon and new Scottish Labour Leader Jim Murphy.  Meanwhile in Aberdeen, Alex Salmond is spotted at the Scottish premiere of the blockbuster Shrek The Musical, set to tour throughout 2015; after the show, exiting the theatre in a Shrek Ears headband, he is mobbed by children who think he is a dead ringer for the hero.

FEBRUARY

The great liberal classic To Kill A Mockingbird visits the King’s in Edinburgh, while Berthold Brecht’s Caucasian Chalk Circle appears at the Lyceum; the Brecht play, famously set on a collective farm, causes a nasty spat about land reform among politicians in the grand circle.  The Citizens’ Theatre revives the great John Byrne classic the Slab Boys, in a new production by David Hayman which also tours to the King’s in Edinburgh; Hayman makes a fiery speech from the stage, and all politicians present walk out in protest except Ruth Davidson of the Tories, who says the play captures the spirit of the aspirational working classes.  Meanwhile, as the National Theatre of Scotland’s vampire story Let The Right One In plays to packed houses in New York, a pale and cadaverous figure is seen in the front row, surrounded by acolytes.  Rumours circulate that the NTS has flown the entire new Scottish Labour shadow cabinet  to New York to see the show, but are dismissed as malicious.

MARCH

The weather grows warmer, and theatre fans note that  two different versions of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Jekyll And Hyde have been on tour around Scotland this spring – one by Jo Clifford for the Sell A Door Theatre Company, the other by Morna Pearson for Lung Ha’s.  One arts journalist advances the theory that this reveals a moment of deep division in the Scottish psyche; but local councillors attending the shows are too busy fighting over the best seats to notice.  It is said that the First Minister and her husband have been seen throwing shapes at a performance of Dirty Dancing in the Edinburgh Playhouse; but the Playhouse denies all knowledge of the visit.

APRIL

The UK general election looms, and the staff at the Citizens’ Theatre are relieved when no violent incidents erupt during performances of David Hare’s The Absence Of War, a searing study of a Labour Party caught between principle and electoral realpolitik, presented by Headlong of London.  Shrek The Musical arrives in Glasgow; and at the Tron, the National Theatre of Scotland launches Kai Fischer’s Last Dream (On Earth), a meditation on a group of young people seeking new horizons beyond a wrecked home planet.  Patrick Harvie of the Scottsh Green Party is guest of honour; harmony prevails.

MAY

The UK general election results in a hung parliament, and a dead heat between Labour and the Conservatives; negotiations ensue which last many months.  The UK’s troubles pale into insignificance, though, by compariuson with a darkening international scene; the Play, Pie And Pint season of lunchtime plays by young Russian and Ukrainian playwrights, co-produced by the National Theatre Of Scotland, is marked not by punch-ups, but by the sight of the young playwrights holding hands and praying for peace in the audience, sometimes accompanied by stray Scottish politicians.

JUNE

Edinburgh City Council announces its new cashless cultural policy; following the Desire Lines event in Edinburgh in December 2014, and subsequent discussions, the council declares Leith Walk as Edinburgh’s new cultural hub.  The new director of the Edinburgh International Festival, Fergus Linehan, welcomes the policy, and announces that as part of his quest to expand the Festival’s audience, he will be hiring Easter Road stadium for the entire month of August, as the main Festival venue; however he is persuaded that the Festival’s flagship performances of  Ivo Van Hove’s Antigone, starring Juliette Binoche, should remain at the King’s Theatre, since more than 10,000 tickets have already been sold.

JULY

Everyone goes on holiday.  News emerges that after a six-month period during which she has been invited to every single theatre event in Scotland, and has endeavoured to attend most of them, Culture Minister Fiona Hyslop has had to retreat to a well-known Borders health spa, for rest and recuperation.

AUGUST

The Edinburgh Festival and Fringe take place mainly in Leith, where both flats and venues are cheaper than in the city centre.  The international festival’s blockbuster production of Sunshine On Leith at Easter Road, featuring a massed choir of Hibs   supporters, can be heard as far away as Morningside, and is named UNESCO cultural event of the year.  The UK’s new interim Prime minister Ed Miliband attends the show and weeps throughout, saying that he wishes he had known about some of these great Proclaimers songs before he went on Desert Island Discs.

SEPTEMBER

Post-Festival calm prevails.  Edinburgh site-specific company Gird Iron tours a revival of their department-store classic Devil’s Larder around the Highlands and the Borders, and Mull Theatre tours a new play by rousing intellectual playwright Peter Arnott.  Many councillors are invited, but no violent incidents result.

OCTOBER

Shrek The Musical arrives in Edinburgh.  The First Minister and her husband are seen in the front row at the Playhouse, wearing flashing Shrek Ears headbands.  But the FM looks melancholy, as if the show reminded her of someone; or of a time when the biggest decisions landed on somebody else’s desk.

NOVEMBER

Chill winds, and still no permanent government at Westminster.

DECEMBER

The panto season.  Ex-Baywatch star David Hasselhoff replaces John Barrowman as the Krankies’ co-star at the SECC panto, giving ace panto writer Alan McHugh a chance to revive his 2014 hit song from Aberdeen, Surfing Cruden Bay.  Meanwhile, in Aberdeen itself, Alex and Moira Salmond are seen leaving His Majesty’s after another glittering panto performance by Elaine C. Smith.  After multiple recounts and legal challenges, the former FM is still not sure whether he won his Westminster seat in the general election; but he and Moira sing a quick panto chorus of Pharrell Williams’s Happy, and look remarkably contented, as they disappear into the north-eastern night.

Note: Apart from the fantasy Edinburgh International Festival production of Sunshine On Leith, all the shows named in this piece are real, and will take place at the times and places mentioned.

ENDS ENDS

In Tragedy And In Joy, Christmas Reminds Us Of The Things That Really Matter; And Of Our Right To Fight For A Politics That Reflects Those Values – Column 26.12.14. –

________________________________________

JOYCE MCMILLAN for The Scotsman 26.12.14.
________________________________________

IT’S A COUPLE of weeks before Christmas; and my hand is reaching for the off-switch on my radio, as I flinch away from the tone and the content of the supposed “comedy” show that has been nipping my ears for the last few minutes.  The show is about a group of youngish thirtysomething British adults all of whom, to put it simply, are horrible.  The women are bossy and manipulative, the men are whining, stupid and endlessly self-indulgent; the humour is based on the theory that this is how people are, and that any attempt by any of these characters to claim any motive beyond greed, lust and infantile selfishness is a lie waiting to be punctured, amid gales of heavy, mirthless laughter from the studio audience.

I can’t remember – and don’t want to know – the show’s title; but to anyone who pauses to think about its meaning, it’s bound to seem more tragic than funny, bitter, depressing and nihilistic.  And while I don’t wish to dwell for long on the obviously flawed and partial account of human nature that drives this kind of comedy, it’s worth remembering just how prevalent it has become across UK culture, as we turn our faces to the real world we inhabit this Christmas, with all its joys and contradictions.

For if there is one abiding truth about the kind of tragedy that hit Glasgow this week, it’s that such events reminds us – in the most painful way – of the things that really matter to us, at Christmas and always.  Faced with a horrific accident like Monday’s tragedy in George Square, we see not greed and selfishness, but the courage and calm of the emergency services, the kindness of passers-by, the empathy of strangers.  And we also know this: that the families of those who lost their lives would give all they have, and every glittering Christmas present they have ever received, to roll back time, and to have their loved ones with them again.

What we know about human beings, in other words,  is that while we need the basic means of life, and will grow desperate if deprived of basic security when it comes to food, shelter and safety, our other needs are less tangible, and often have more to do with finding a sense of purpose in life, with creating something worthwhile, and with forming good relationships, than with ever-increasing material wealth.  The idea that material greed and self-aggrandisement is always the central motive of human action is useful, of course, if you are running an economy and politics based on the idea of perpetual material growth.

Yet the weight of the joyless propaganda about human nature needed to sustain that idea, the increasing social and environmental destruction imposed by it, the structural failure of the unregulated financial system it has spawned, and the sheer inefficiency of the grotesque economic inequality it produces, suggests that the “Selfish Gene” era of western politics is at last drawing to a close, with even some centre-right governments now sttempting to introduce measures of “wellbeing” alongside those of crude economic performance; and that one New Year’s gift we could give ourselves might be to stop wasting time on the idea, routinely disproved by experience, that people will never make material sacrifices for gains that they value more than wealth – for love, for security, for community, or for a richer quality of everyday life.

Then secondly, we need somehow to stop wasting so much political energy on the abstruse right-wing notion – popular among transatlantic elites, but almost entirely rejected by ordinary voters – that the state has no role in expressing the most positive or altruistic aspects of human nature, and should back off and leave them to private charity, or what David Cameron once called the “Big Society”.  The theory is that if the state takes on the task of housing the homeless, healing the sick and supporting the needy, moral decay will set in, as people shrug off their moral and social responsibilities and leave them to faceless bureaucrats.  It is a Victorian argument, and one from which British society was supposed to have moved on more than a century ago; but it enjoyed a strange rebirth in the neoliberal 1980’s, and is now alive and well in some of the policy decisions of the present Coalition government, including the staggeringly punitive and undignified “sanctions” regime under which British benefit claimants now struggle, vividly denounced this week by the Scottish Government’s new economic advisor, Harry Burns.

And to this, all that can be said is that there is little or no  evidence to support the anti-welfare-state thesis.  On the contrary, all the evidence suggests that the countries with the highest levels of welfare state provision are also those with the most active civil societies, and the highest levels of general wellbeing; and, even more importantly, that in a functioning democracy, citizens regard the state not as some distant bureaucracy to be mistrusted and attacked, but as a primary representative of the people’s collective decisions and values, to be held firmly to account from day to day.

If the people of Glasgow show magnificent levels of compassion and solidarity in a time of tragedy, in other words, they do so not in conflict with official agencies like the police, the NHS, the fire service, but in harmony with them.  And whatever name we give to our politics, I think we can reasonably ask this, as a vital element of the living  democracy about which we have learned so much in Scotland this year: that our political institutions reflect not just one aspect of us, but strive to work in harmony with whole complex truth of our nature, including the kindness, compassion, and faith in each other that so often comes to the fore at this time of year – sometimes, alas, for the saddest of reasons, but also in the quiet happiness we feel when we finally come together to raise a glass with our nearest and dearest, and to share those moments of memory, understanding and laughter that we miss most when loved ones are lost, and on which no-one – mercifully – has ever been able to put a price.

ENDS ENDS

The Little Boy That Santa Claus Forgot

________________________________________________________

JOYCE MCMILLAN on THE LITTLE BOY THAT SANTA CLAUS FORGOT for The Scotsman 22.12.14. _________________________________________________________

4 stars ****

ON STAGE at the Arches, Mr McGregor is not happy.  Two years running, his little friend Johnny, the newspaper boy, has had no Christmas presents.  And somehow, Mr McGregor seems to be responsible – so much so that in disgust with himself, he cancels Christmas altogether, leaving the world to languish its way through long dreary winters without so much as a drop of festivity to relieve the gloom.

It’s not ideal for tiny toddlers, this latest Arches Christmas show, written by Oliver Emanuel and directed by Gareth Nicholls, and playing until 4 January; the themes are a shade too substantial, the acting too intense.  For its advertised age-group of 3-5 year-olds, though, The Little Boy That Santa Claus Forgot offers a rich feast of thought and feeling about Christmas, and about how Johnny finally has to step in and help, to make sure that the old midwinter magic works again.

Claire Halleran creates a crumpled domestic set – Mr. McGregor’s living-room – that also seems magically linked to the turning of the year.  There’s a puppet sleigh with souped-up diesel engines, a map of the world that magically pops up from the floor, and a superb central performance David Ireland as the grumpy, tormented Mr McGregor, full of guilt and self-doubt.  And by the time Ireland and Alasdair Hankinson, as Johnny, break out into a final song-and-dance chorus of Sleigh Ride, the young audience are on their feet dancing too, full of the joys of a Christmas that’s not only a gift from the adult world, but something that they – like Johnny – might one day be able to help create, for themselves.

ENDS ENDS

Tortoise And Hare (North Edinburgh Arts Centre)

________________________________________________________

JOYCE MCMILLAN on HARE & TORTOISE at North Edinburgh Arts Centre, for The Scotsman 20.12.14. _________________________________________________________

3 stars ***

THE HARE IS SPEEDY, the tortoise is slow, the audience is divided into two camps, and the race begins.  Licketyspit’s show Hare And Tortoise, now rewritten for Christmas and playing until today at North Edinburgh Arts, has one of the best opening sequences of any children’s show around, not least because of its gorgeous Licketyspit inroductory explanation that theatre is just a form of storytelling where you get to see the story in action, and that there’s about to be some action worth watching.

As a piece of theatre, Hare & Tortoise still sports many of the same assets and flaws it had on its first outing, five years ago.  The central story and the tension between the two characters remains strong, the design still fails to show the route of the race in a way that would make it easy to follow the course of the actio, and to enjoy the script’s many interruptions, and the show is still  perhaps five minutes too long, with some pretty dire comedy interludes involving old ladies.

The joy of Licketyspit, though, lies not only in the shows themselves, but in the tremendous work they do around their performances, vividly illustrated at North Edinburgh Arts in a terrific exhibition of responses to the story by children from three Edinburgh primary schools.  The Hare And The Tortoise is one of the oldest stories known to humankind; yet as the children’s artwork shows, once we begin to tease out what it has to say about human character and achievement, there’s no end to its fascination, or to the vivid images it suggests to our minds.

ENDS ENDS

Nights Before Christmas (Village Pub Theatre)

________________________________________________________

JOYCE MCMILLAN on NIGHTS BEFORE CHRISTMAS at the Village Pub Theatre, Edinburgh, for The Scotsman 20.12.14. _________________________________________________________

4 stars ****

THERE’S A COSY back room in a famous Edinburgh pub, there’s cake, there’s laughter, and there’s a chance – for just £3 – to experience an evening of live script-in-hand performance, created by some of Scotland’s brightest young writers and actors.  So it’s not surprising that Edinburgh’s Village Pub Theatre has fast become a such popular feature of the city’s grassroots theatre scene, or that such a merry crowd assembled on Wednesday night for VPT’s Christmas selection of tiny ten-minute plays.

Directed by Caitling Skinner and distinguished guest Philip Howard, this week’s show featured no fewer than nine Christmas-themed plays.  Giles Conisbee’s Smoke And Satsumas shows a couple painfully trying to make a Christmas go of things, for their children, after an unnamed crisis that has destroyed the woman’s love for her man.  Wiggly Worms by actor-writer Jonathan Holt explodes with theatrical energy, as two drugged-up toy-store assistants try to deal with a wholly inappropriate gift one of them has bought for a woman he fancies.  Grace Cleary’s Spaso At Christmas plays wonderful word-games with the apparently confused Christmas perceptions of a girl who sees more than people think, and both Samuel Jameson’s Gigolo All The Way and Helen Shutt’s Leaves On the Line are like the first scenes of well-written, bitter-sweet modern rom-coms.  The plays are tiny but bursting with promise; and the actors are heroes, as a  five-strong team led by Jenny Hulse, Paul Cunningham  and Victoria Balnaves Aitken, seize these tiny fragments of drama and make them live, for an audience who could hardly be happier if they were in the front row at Drury Lane.

ENDS ENDS

Cinderella (SECC 2014)

________________________________________________________

JOYCE MCMILLAN on CINDERELLA at the SECC, Glasgow, for The Scotsman 20.12.14. _________________________________________________________

3 stars ***

IT’S BIG, IT’S BRASH, and sometimes it’s just very, very naughty; it’s also well within the great Glasgow panto tradition, and likely to be the last Christmas show for a while featuring both John Barrowman and The Krankies, as Barrowman takes a panto break.  So Glasgow might as well relish this year’s spectacular Cinderella at the SECC, which comes complete with an animatronic flying horse to pull Cinderella’s pumpkin coach to the ball, and gorgeous Scottish X-Factor star Melanie Masson, making her Glasgow panto debut as Cinders’s Fairy Godmother.

With all three of the panto’s biggest stars concentrated in the comic subplot, the romantic story struggles to make itself heard in this version of Cinderella; Barrowman plays Buttons (with the audience needing barely any assistance in turning his unrequited love for Cinderella into a camp joke), Jeanette Krankie is in particularly sharp form as Buttons’s wee brother Zip (Zip or Buttons, geddit?) while Ian Krankie plays Baron Hardup, and Graham Hoadly and Wayne Fitzsimmons, as two memorably hideous Ugly Sisters, struggle to make much impression on a stage so crowded with comedy.  It all comes right in the end, though; and if the sound quality is occasionally rough, Barrowman sings as well as ever, and the company produce the  best closing chorus of Happy on my panto trail so far – which is quite an achievement, given the appearance nearly everywhere, across Scottish pantoland this year, of the Pharrell Williams’s song that has become the iconic panto hit of 2014.

ENDS ENDS

Theatre Review Of The Year, 2014

___________________________________________________

JOYCE MCMILLAN on REVIEW OF 2014, for The Scotsman, 20.12.14.
___________________________________________________

LONG BEFORE IT BEGAN, we knew that 2014 would be a year marked by momentous events and anniversaries; the year of the Commonwealth Games, the centenary of the outbreak of the First World War, and above all the year of Scotland’s independence referendum.  The outgoing director of the Edinburgh Festival, Jonathan Mills, even invited controversy, back in 2013, by declaring that he would programme events to mark the first two of these occasions, but not the third; although in the end, he staged the world premiere of the most spectacular and talked-about Scottish theatre show of the year, rich in contemporary political resonances, in the shape of Rona Munro’s James Plays, a great three-play history cycle about the early Stewart kings co-produced by the Edinburgh International Festival with the National Theatre of Scotland and the National Theatre of Great Britain.

The James Plays opened at the Festival Theatre in August – with audiences thrilled by sheer scale and boldness of the arena-like staging – and then went on to take London by storm, playing to packed houses at the Olivier Theatre, winning the Evening Standard award for Best New Play, and moving one London critic to describe it as “better than Shakespeare”.  And although the plays’ relationship to the real stuff of contemporary Scottish politics was probable marginal at best, the glorious success of the production firmly established the NTS’s Laurie Sansom as a world-class large-scale director, and a powerful hand on the tiller of Scotland’s national company.

And all across Scottish theatre this year, it was possible to trace similar tensions, a mixture of business as usual, and an acknowledgment that, even if artists cannot be expected to dance to the drumbeat of official events and short-term politics, this was a special year, and one that offered unusual  opportunities.  During the Commonwealth Games cultural programe – played out against the backdrop of a near-tropical heatwave along the Clyde – the National Theatre Of Scotland created a huge community project called Tin Forest, based on a much-loved children’s story, and built around the theme of urban regeneration; the final event – among many Games-related shows around the city – was a memorable piece of puppet theatre, staged at the South Rotunda on the Clyde.  The First World War was remembered in dozens of shows, as the Edinburgh International Festival played host to Luk Perceval’s Front from Hamburg, and the Chekhov International Theatre Festival’s The War, from Moscow.   In a fine year for the Festival and King’s Theatres in Edinburgh, they staged the National Theatre’s mighty War Horse in January, and the stage version of Pat Barker’s fine First World War war novel Regeneration in September; and the new Beacon Arts Centre at Greenock came together with the touring company Sell A Door to present an autumn tour of Sunset Song, Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s great novel about how the Great War marked the end of a farming way of life in the Mearns of north-east Scotland.

The referendum, though, posed a tougher challenge to Scottish writers and theatre-makers; in many ways, the creative response to it was a living demonstration of how art and politics move to different drum-beats.  On one hand, most Scottish playwrights produced their major work on Scotland’s emerging post-modern identity twenty years ago, in the long run-up to the devolution referendum of 1997; on the other, their great plays about the 2014  referendum and its outcome are probably at least half a decade in the future.

Yet if most of the work written about the referendum this year was fragmentary, short-form, instant-response stuff – often produced by artists on a kind of political sabbatical from their normal work – the National Theatre of Scotland stepped up magnificently to the task of collating some of this work into a series of memorable events, ranging from the spring Dear Scotland project at the National Portrait Gallery, in which 20 leading writers gave a voice to the subjects of pictures in the gallery, to the Great Yes-No-Don’t-Know 5-Minute Theatre Show of tiny live-streamed plays from across the country, staged at midsummer.

The Great Yes-No-Don’t Know Show was overshadowed, though, by the death just ten days before the event of David MacLennan, one of its two co-curators, founder of both Wildcat Stage Productions in the 1970’s, and the A Play, A Pie And A Pint lunchtime theatre phenomenon of the last ten years; MacLennan’s co-curator David Greig’s Letter To David, a final message from a yes supporter to a friend who was a no supporter, was perhaps the finest single piece of theatre writing to emerge from Scotland’s great referendum debate.

It was a year of too many farewells in Scottish theatre, marked by the loss not only of David MacLennan, but also of the former Royal Lyceum Theatre director Kenny Ireland, a veteran, like MacLennan, of the radical 1970’s generation of Scottish theatre-makers.  Ireland would doubtless have been impressed, though,  by a fine year’s work at the Royal Lyceum, which opened in January with a perfectly-pitched ensemble production of A Long Day’s Journey Into Night, included a bold spring staging of one of the few full-length new referendum plays of the year in Tim Barrow’s messy a but hugely vivid Union, continued with a much-admired world premiere of David Haig’s conventional but powerful Second World War drama, Pressure, and also featured successful autumn productions of D.C. Jackson’s new gangster drama Kill Johnny Glendenning, and Sue Glover’s great modern Scottish classic, Bondagers.  It was a year that made it all the more surprising to learn that the Lyceum had been hit by an unexpected 17% cut, in the first round of Creative Scotland’s new Regular Funding system; in grim news for Edinburgh’s two major producing theatres, the Traverse also suffered a significant reduction in support.

Elsewhere, Pitlochry Festival Theatre staged a rich summer season of Scottish plays ranging from Stephen Greenhorn’s Passing Places to J.M. Barrie’s Admirable Crichton, and announced the start of fund-raising for some massive new building plans.  The Citizens’ enjoyed another successful year under Dominic Hill’s artistic directorship, and is also on the brink of major construction work.  Scotland’s impressive generation of artists with disability went from strength to strength in 2014, building an outstanding international reputation; shows like Wendy Hoose – a hilarious sex comedy from Random Accomplice and Birds Of Paradise – and Claire Cunningham’s Commonwealth Games  show Guide Gods, about religious attitudes to disability, formed a rich seam of work in Scotland this year.

And theatre continued to happen in new and exciting spaces across the country, from the forests of Fife – where I watched a snowy Midwinter Night’s Dream on a chill February evening – to the great sugar-sheds at Greenock, opened up this year for a spectacular community show called White Gold, and the basement labyrinth of Summerhall in Edinburgh, which helped inspired The Voice Thief, the latest show from leading Scottish chldren’s company Catherine Wheels.  Whether Scottish theatre won or lost, in this dramatic year of debate and remembrance, remains to be seen; the implications of Creative Scotland’s new funding regime are complex, and will take months if not years to emerge in full.  Yet in 2014 the nation’s theatre artists played their hand with impressive flair, through complicated times; and through what must have been one of the busiest years in the whole history of Scottish theatre and performance.

Note: the NTS’s Dear Scotland and Great Yes-No-Don’t-Know Show plays are all available online, at http://www.thespace.org/artwork/view/dearscotlandpoetspub#dearscotlandpoetspub  and
http://fiveminutetheatre.com/five-minute-theatre-%E2%80%93-the-great-yes-no-dont-know-2014/.

ENDS ENDS

Jim Murphy Joins Nicola Sturgeon On The Social Democratic Santa Sleigh: But His Own Unquestioning Unionism May Make It Hard For Him To Deliver – Column 19.12.14.

________________________________________

JOYCE MCMILLAN for The Scotsman 19.12.14.
________________________________________

WELL HO, HO, HO, AND a jingle of bells; because this Christmas, in Scotland, there are political Santas everywhere, promising to bring us – at last – exactly what we always wanted.  For as the remarkable year of 2014 slips away, we find both Labour and the SNP – still our two largest parties at the ballot box – locked in a fierce competition as to who can be, in Jim Murphy’s words “the best social democrats”, and can bring Scotland the kind of governance we tend to believe we crave.

The new First Minister, Nicola Sturgeon, has of course long declared that her aim is to make Scotland a great 21st century social democracy; and so long as the Labour Party could be relied upon to blunder about in the badlands of post-Blairite ideological confusion, it was a promise that served her and her party well – well enough to bring Scotland to the brink of independence.  Now, though, St. Nicola is joined on the social democratic sleigh by a new Santa figure, thin, teetotal and vegetarian, but definitely sporting a red suit and bag of goodies; for Jim Murphy, the new Scottish Labour leader, has this week declared himself not only for social democracy but for democratic socialism, delivering a series of ecstatic speeches about his blazing commitment to social justice, and to an equal chance in life for every Scot.

So what are we to make of this new force in the land, as we tremulously pin our political stockings to the mantelpiece?  There’s no denying that Santa Jim has some formidable assets, in his fight to win back the hearts of the Scottish people for his   bruised and damaged Labour Party.  Among them is the first rule of politics, that whatever goes up, must eventually come down.  The SNP has enjoyed an extraordinary honeymoon relationship with the Scottish electorate since it first became our party of government in 2007, culminating in a strong referendum performance, a huge surge in party membership, and unprecedented post-referendum poll ratings.

Sooner or later, though, this phase in the SNP’s history must end; and an aggressive and confident Jim Murphy may, at that point, be well placed to take advantage of any emerging sense of disillusion among voters.  And if we add to the picture Jim Murphy’s obvious ambition and determination, his “captain of the football  team” appeal to a whole tranche of male voters, the support he enjoys in some sections of the media, and the attractivenes of his own upwardly-mobile life story to aspirational Scots everywhere, it’s clear that he holds a political hand worth playing, and will play it as if his political life depended on it – which it does.

Yet for all the new energy Jim Murphy has already brought to the Scottish Labour cause, there are handicaps he wlll struggle to overcome.  Within his party, for example, he is an intensely divisive figure; and while bad-mouthing Murphy as a “Blairite” is a sport for left-leaning political insiders, and carries little meaning for most voters, it is still difficult to imagine Murphy as the leader best placed to rebuild Labour’s grassroots campaigning strength, in the face of the new mood of popular engagement in Scottish politics.

Then secondly, there is the question of Jim Murphy’s undeniable links to a number of fairly right-wing causes, including his membership of the transatlantic neoconservative association the Henry Jackson Society.  Once again, these allegiances are of little interest to most voters; but if the SNP can rouse itself from its current  mood of profound ideological complacency, these facts should provide them with some detailed opportunities to test just how deep Jim Murphy’s commitment to social democracy really runs.  It would be interesting to know, for instance, where he stands on the hugely controversial TTIP (Transatlantic Trade And Investment Partnership), which represents a real threat to democratic decision-making wherever it conflicts with corporate interests.

And finally, there is the fact that Jim Murphy has been, and remains, a senior Westminster politician, closely associated in the public mind both with Westminster’s lavish expenses regime, and with the general rightward movement of Labour Westminster politics over the last two decades.  It’s this that makes ordinary people in Labour’s heartland Scottish constituencies feel that Labour no longer speaks for them, and this that has caused Labour membership in Scotland to dwindle to its present parlous level.  And in confronting this, Jim Murphy has already made the mistake most characteristic of Westminster politicians and pundits who do not really listen; he has assumed that Scottish politics is now substantially about “patriotism”, and that voters want to hear him constantly assert that he will “put Scotland first”.

For myself, though – and I think for many others who voted yes in September – this new language of Murphy’s is several shades too exclusive and nationalistic; for many, voting yes was not so much about “putting Scotland first” as about putting people first, and trying to find a political solution that would open up an alternative to the city-driven form of neoliberal capitalism that now dominates UK politics.

And that, in the end, raises the biggest question for the new Jim Murphy we have seen this week.  For the truth is that is continuing to support the Union so unquestioningly, Jim Murphy sends out a political dog-whistle not to traditional working-class voters in Scotland’s Labour heartlands, but to all the conservative forces in Scotland and the UK who yearn for a Scottish Unionist leader forceful enough to push the SNP back to the margins of politics, where they think it belongs.

It’s for this reason that the satirical website the Daily Mash hit the nail so resoundingly on the head, this week, when it joked that Jim Murphy had just become the leader of both Labour and the Conservatives in Scotland.  And it’s this contradiction – between the language of radical social democracy he speaks, and the profound establishment conservatism of the Unionist cause he represents – that may finally scupper Jim Murphy’s chances of emerging as the dominant force in Scottish politics; although if anyone has the sheer determination to try to square that circle, and to make the contradictions work for another decade or two, then Jim Murphy – lean, hungry and driven – is probably that man.

ENDS ENDS

Sleeping Beauty (Perth 2014)

________________________________________________________

JOYCE MCMILLAN on SLEEPING BEAUTY at Perth Concert Hall, for The Scotsman 15.12.14.
_________________________________________________________

3 stars ***

IT MAY NOT be how you expect your annual panto to start – a howl of air-raid sirens, searchlights sweeping the auditorium, and a swift chorus from three female cast members dressed up like the Andrews Sisters.  There’s no lack of cheeky reinvention, though, in this year’s brave, bold and super-colourful Perth panto, transferred to the Concert Hall at Horsecross while Perth Theatre undergoes a major refit.  Born in 1946, as the Second World War comes to an end, our gorgeous Sleeping Beauty – in this version by Alan McHugh – celebrates her 21st birthday in 1967, creating endless opportunities for director/designer Kenny Miller to conjure up kitsch versions of Sixties fashion and design, from Princess Ailie’s baby-doll pyjama parties to a vaguely psychedelic wedding scene.

If perfection is what you’re after, then this Perth panto is not for you.  McHugh’s script, in this version, plays fast and loose with the story to the extent that we’re not sure whether Ailie’s been asleep for a hundred years or five minutes, and Gayle Telfer Stevens’s golden-voiced bad fairy, Lucretia, is just too nasty to be fun.  Yet there are some tremendously witty, enjoyable performances, from Louise McCarthy as a gorgeous, feisty Princess Ailie, Jo Freer as her proletarian best mate Jinty, Ian Grieve as dotty King Hector, and Barrie Hunter as an ever more confident Perth dame.  There are feeble moments, and plenty of glorious bad taste; but if pure fun is your tipple, then the Perth panto offers plenty of it, along with a rousing play-list of pop standards, belted out by an eleven-strong cast, a brilliant team of six youngsters from local schools, and a stalwart two-piece live band.

ENDS ENDS

Beauty And The Beast, Robin

________________________________________________________

JOYCE MCMILLAN on BEAUTY AND THE BEAST at His Majesty’s theatre, Aberdeen, and ROBIN at the Lemon Tree, Aberdeen, for The Scotsman 20.12.14. _________________________________________________________

Beauty And The Beast  4 stars****
Robin   3 stars***

STAGING A BIG family panto is a difficult business, no question; a feat of co-ordination that involves music, dance, storytelling, slapstick, comedy, star performances, lashings of audience participation, and a special quality of local belonging that always looms large in the very best pantos.  And if you want to see all of these panto ducks pulled into a row – firmly, effectively, and with a joyful sense of living tradition – then there’s no doubt that the place to be in Scotland at the moment is His Majesty’s Theatre, Aberdeen, where they take big standard Qdos pantos firmly in hand, and transform them into brilliant afternoons and evenings of north-eastern family  entertainment.

So in this year’s show – produced by Michael Harrison, written by Alan McHugh, and directed by Sam Kane – we see the well-established His Majesty’s team of Elaine C. Smith, Alan McHugh and Jordan Young seize the tale of Beauty And The Beast, and drop-kick it straight through goal-posts of panto success. Beauty And The Beast is one of the most magical and romantic of all panto stories, and Ian Westbrook’s Qdos design does it full justice, conjuring up the echoing halls of the Beast’s loveless castle, and the garden where hope springs up with the roses; and the Aberdeen panto, which features a lovely Belle in Maggie Lynne, gives the romantic story its rightful place at the heart of the show.  Elaine C. Smith travels easily between the romantic story and the comic subplot as the Beast’s kindly housekeer Mrs. Potty; and Alan McHugh and Jordan Young are in ripe comic form as Belle’s daft friends Kitty and Boabby.  The music is fine, Elaine C. is in magnificent voice, the kids of the Aberdeen Academy of Dance hoof the night away in brilliant style; and the local jokes and references are firmly in place, including McHugh’s hilarious spoof Beach Boys song, Surfing Cruden Bay.

At the Lemon Tree, meanwhile, the award-winning children’s company Frozen Charlotte offers an attractive 45-minute show for younger children in the shape of Robin, the tale of a friendly robin redbreast who decides to help out with the post on Christmas Eve.  The central feature of the show is the pretty, model-village-like set, by Katy and Neil Wilson and Kirsty Roberts, which shows Robin’s hometown as a little winding hill town with door numbers like an advent calendar, up and down which puppet versions of the characters make their way – particularly Robin, as he delivers huge bags of letters to the mysterious house at the top, No. 24.

In its present form this charming show has two problems, in that the actor playing Robin, Ben Clifford, looks nothing like a Robin, and the story lacks clear structural opportunities for the audience to join in and help.  With some tweaking of the script, though, and a few clearer visual signals about Robin’s status as a talking bird, this show could mature into a delightful Christmas classic; and it features some heroic work from Clifford’s co-performer Laurie Brown, who plays all the other puppet characters in the story, from behind the many doors of a truly gorgeous set.

ENDS ENDS