1982–1990: The Road to Glasgow City of Culture
In the first years of the 1980s, Scottish theatre was caught in a strange, subdued place, somewhere between hope and despair. The 1970s had been a time of huge, energetic change in Scotland’s theatre culture, as the post-war generation began to claim their place on the nation’s stages, and the generous arts funding of the 1960s and 1970s began to bear fruit. It was the decade when Giles Havergal and his co-directors Philip Prowse and Robert David MacDonald came to the Citizens’ Theatre in Glasgow, and within a few years made it one of the most famous and spectacular city theatres in Europe. It was the decade when John McGrath launched 7:84 Scotland, with his legendary ceilidh show The Cheviot, the Stag and the Black, Black Oil. And it was the decade when the Traverse Theatre in Edinburgh – under Chris Parr’s directorship – opened its doors to Scottish writers as never before, making space for a whole new generation of groundbreaking playwrights, including John Byrne, Tom McGrath, Donald Campbell, Marcella Evaristi and many others.
In 1979, though, the process of political change that seemed to match and reflect this cultural shift came to a shuddering halt, as the campaign for Scottish home rule – or devolution within the UK – ended in a failed referendum: a majority of those taking part voted ‘yes’, but the numbers were not high enough to clear an extra hurdle set by the Westminster Parliament. Scotland berated itself as the ‘cowardly lion’ of UK politics, and Jim Callaghan’s Labour government fell, making way for Margaret Thatcher and her new Conservatives; and in the smaller world of Scottish theatre there was a minor earthquake, as many of the performing stars of the 1970s generation – Bill Paterson, Alex Norton, John Bett, Billy Connolly, Kenny Ireland – left Scotland to build their careers in London.
By 1982 there were signs of recovery, and of a kind of regrouping. Already, the fierce opposition to Margaret Thatcher’s government which was to shape Scottish politics for the next twenty years was beginning to generate new ideas about what kind of society Scotland could and should be, if it rejected this new right-wing form of Britishness, and strove again for self-government. As in most stories of European nation-building – think of Ireland or Norway, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries – theatre had a vital role to play, as a place where ideas about the past, the future, the language, the ever-shifting identity of the nation could be tested, developed and enriched.
And by chance – or perhaps for reasons I barely understood at the time – it was around this moment of transition, at the end of the 1970s and the beginning of the 1980s, that I felt myself drawn, perhaps almost driven, to become a theatre critic in Scotland. I had already been reviewing for more than three years, mainly as a second- or third-string critic for The Scotsman, and an occasional reviewer on BBC Radio Scotland. But in 1981 the management of the Glasgow Herald launched a new Sunday paper, the Sunday Standard; and with an energy and focus that sometimes surprised me, I began to work my way into the role of the paper’s main theatre critic. I was already almost thirty, I had no history of interest in theatre beyond an academic one, and like many people who grew up in the 1960s, I saw theatre as an old-fashioned art form, already half-dead on its feet.
Yet in the late 1970s, I was suddenly gripped by the power of the shared experience of theatre, by the idea of it as a place where ideas could be made flesh, and could be tested against the real reactions of the audience. Perhaps it was a reaction to the repetitiveness, and frequent intellectual rigidity, of the left-wing and feminist politics in which I was vaguely involved. Perhaps it was an unconscious response to the coming of Thatcherism: an insistence that somewhere, even if only in a series of small darkened rooms, a serious collective life would continue through this age of individualism. Or perhaps it was something in Scottish theatre itself, evolving fast and freely after a long age of quiescence and marginalisation. If Scotland’s professional theatre tradition had been limited and interrupted by centuries of official Presbyterianism, that very history – or rather the lack of it – meant that it entered the late twentieth century with relatively little baggage, and an exhilarating freedom to reinvent itself, in forms that were both popular and experimental.
So, at the beginning of 1982, I began to set out my stall as the Sunday Standard’s main theatre critic. In the big world beyond theatre, there were three huge arguments in progress. There was one about the future of the British left, after Margaret Thatcher’s victory in 1979; in theatre, that was often articulated through my arguments with, and about, John McGrath’s 7:84 Company, and its sister company Wildcat Stage Productions. There was an argument about feminism, a fraught coming-to-terms with the huge revolution in consciousness that had taken place during the 1970s. And, of course, there was the argument about Scotland: rousing itself after the failed home-rule referendum of 1979, and once again setting out to redefine and reshape itself. At the time, the Scottish Arts Council was funding around fifteen major professional companies in Scotland, including the building-based ones in Edinburgh, Glasgow, Dundee, Perth and Pitlochry; and, in 1981, it had also decided to fund an initiative by the actor Ewan Hooper to launch a new Scottish Theatre Company, dedicated to creating Scottish-made shows for mainstage theatres, and – in some respects at least – to pursuing a more traditional Scottish repertoire than could be found at the Traverse or the Citizens’. It was through the work of the STC, and my often sceptical reactions to it, that I began to evolve my own ideas about what the word ‘Scottish’ could and should mean, in the late twentieth century; and about our evolving relationship with the standard repertoire of English-language theatre.
At the beginning of 1982, though, I was still engaged in an angry young critic’s war against the kind of ‘dead’, conventional theatre that I felt was destroying the art form from within. The early reviews are full of harsh comparisons, for example between a super-conventional The Lady’s Not for Burning at Pitlochry, and the explosive radicalism of Giles Havergal’s groundbreaking 1982 revival of Men Should Weep. And so it was with a kind of vision of the future that I started the year in the Sunday Standard.
I sometimes think it would do Scottish theatre no harm if theatres were knocked flat, and companies consigned to school halls, car parks, and any other space that offered itself. As 1982 begins, almost all the clouds on the theatrical horizon seem to concern bricks and mortar. Dundee Rep have been awaiting completion of their new theatre for so long that the company’s harassed director, Robert Robertson, must be wondering whether he should have pitched a tent on the river front and had done with it.
The Traverse Theatre Club [in Edinburgh] seems on the point of beginning the long process of moving to new premises with a larger auditorium – although their present 100-seat premises are rarely full. The threatened implementation of the Stodart Report, which suggested that responsibility for the arts should be transferred from regional to district councils, places a particularly large question mark over the future of those municipally owned theatres which have no resident company to fight for them – the prime example being the King’s Theatre in Edinburgh, which now has a vigorous, if ungainly, competitor for funds in the shape of the elephantine Edinburgh Playhouse.
Inside the theatre companies, though, the atmosphere this New Year is far from gloomy. The threat of a standstill in Arts Council funding has been lifted, and, surveying the scene last week, I found it impossible not to admire the combination of optimism, determination and sheer nerve with which directors and administrators continue to plan for the future through continuing crises.
Only three companies – Borderline, the Byre and the Traverse – have been unable to announce plans for 1982, and none seems particularly downcast. The Byre, Scotland’s least heavily subsidised theatre in 1981 and 1982, offered a definite opening date for its season – 3 May.
The Royal Lyceum in Edinburgh presents a particularly striking example of skilful navigation in a tight corner this winter – the company has weathered the loss of its major Christmas production, and now finds itself with only two ‘dark’ weeks between now and the end of April. One of these gaps is likely to be filled by a visiting company, and during the other – the last week in January – the company will be in action at the Eden Court Theatre, Inverness, with its current production of Absurd Person Singular. The company’s spring season opens on 17 March, and will include productions of Tom Stoppard’s Jumpers, and of Piaf, Pam Gems’s wildly successful play about the legendary French singer. 1982 will not be a year of major expansion for Scottish theatre, but it already seems likely to produce another, and possibly even more exciting, trend – a smashing of barriers, a rapid growth of ‘sideways’ contacts among theatres in Scotland, and between theatres in Scotland and elsewhere. In February, the new Scottish Theatre Company will present a four-week season at the Royal Lyceum in Edinburgh. Cathy Czerkawska’s Heroes and Others, which deals with the intensely contemporary subject of Poland and the rise of Solidarity, opens there on 4 February, and will be followed by a production of Charles Macklin’s The Man of the World, starring Iain Cuthbertson. In March, Wildcat will visit the Lyceum with their new production 1982, directed by Ian Wooldridge of Theatre About Glasgow.
The most interesting prospect for spring, though, is the series of four ‘Unity’ plays which 7:84 Scotland are to present at the Mitchell Theatre in Glasgow. This is a series of left-wing and broadly ‘social realist’ plays, dating from the 1930s and 1940s, and depicting Scottish working-class life at that time.
My plea to Scottish theatre companies in 1982 is this: have the confidence to give us the best that world theatre has to offer. Radical, talented companies like 7:84 and Wildcat ought to be cutting their teeth on the best material there is – on production, adaptations and modern versions of Brecht, Shakespeare, Molière, Chekhov. If Shakespeare was not too proud to borrow good, gripping plots wherever he could find one, I can hardly see why Scottish playwrights should not do the same.
‘Has the revolution reached the whorehouse yet?’ says one prostitute to another towards the end of The Screens, thereby bringing the cycle of three Genet plays at Glasgow Citizens’ Theatre back full-circle to the question with which it began five weeks ago, amid the huge gilded pillars and strategically placed bidets of Madame Irma’s Paris brothel in The Balcony.
For Jean Genet, it seems, the answer to that question is always ‘no’. As he suggests in The Balcony – the first and perhaps the most powerful of the plays – the world itself is little more than a great eternal whorehouse; or, as Madame Irma would have it, a ‘house of illusions’, in which people satisfy their base bodily cravings by acting out vicious and deluded fantasies of power, as generals, bishops, judges, politicians.
Written in 1960 at the height of France’s Algerian crisis, The Screens brings this corrupt political and military system into conflict with the forces of Arab revolution; but even here, in a turbulent North African village, the winners are neither the deluded imperialists, nor those Arabs who are idealistic or careless enough to die in the revolutionary cause, but the ultimate realists – the whores, the thieves and the pimps who understand the crude price of everything, and set no store by ideas or ideals.
In an attempt to draw a contemporary parallel with the violent nationalism of the Arab terrorists, the cast of The Screens deliver their lines in distinctly Irish tones, and the resulting cacophony of silly, distorted Irish-Arab voices – mangling Robert David MacDonald’s fine, vigorous translation of the text – is sadly all too typical of director Philip Prowse’s general approach in this Genet season.
His designs – all based on the huge, breathtaking mirror image of the theatre auditorium created for The Balcony’s ‘house of illusions’ – have been predictably magnificent, but as a director, he seems unable to communicate to actors the dazzling insight reflected in his sets.
Only in The Blacks, the central play of the series, did the company’s performance reflect a real sense of the significance of the piece, which concerns the ritual murder of a group of absurd white power figures by a company of negro actors. Elsewhere, they rush at Genet’s dense, poetic text boldly but often uncomprehendingly, delivering the lines without the lucid awareness of underlying rhythms and meanings that would give the whole cycle a sense of pace, coherence and shape; and is absolutely essential if the audience’s interest is to be caught, held and nurtured through to the end of this vitally important tragedy.
Heaven knows, Leslie Lawton’s regime at the Royal Lyceum in Edinburgh has never had any pretensions to intellectual respectability. Its aim – solidly backed by the theatre board – has been to turn out slick, professional entertainment, to put bottoms on seats, and to keep on giving the old razzle-dazzle for as long as the Arts Council and local authorities are prepared to finance it.
But last Monday, the august auditorium of the Lyceum witnessed a scene that would surely have astonished any visiting dignitary who happened to be under the impression that this was Edinburgh’s prime subsidised theatre.
In the seats, an audience of cheerful punters, including a contingent of ageing Tom Lehrer fans; on the stage, a competent but tired-looking bunch of provincial entertainers, hoofing and warbling their way through a cosy, saccharine version of Tomfoolery, an anthology of Lehrer’s satirical songs from the fifties and sixties. Told that one of the hoofers – the one with the silver waistcoat, the unbelievably lewd and smutty expression, and (for let no one doubt Mr Lawton’s skill as an entertainer) the fearsome ability to manipulate the response of a large section of the audience – was the artistic director of the Lyceum company, the visiting dignitary might well have burst into ribald laughter.
Tom Lehrer was always a fairly respectable kind of dissident, but in their day his songs performed a valuable function in casting a dry, satirical and wickedly intelligent eye over the sacred cows of American society, and they are still well worth hearing – and very funny – today. In this ‘Lawtonised’ version, however, the sharp, bitter, even angry quality of Lehrer’s writing is sugared over with the coy and utterly dated mannerisms of old-style British light entertainment. The mood is more ENSA than M*A*S*H, the standard of performance ranges from the routine to the poor, and Mr Lawton demonstrates yet again his complete inability to distinguish between adolescent innuendo and smut – particularly on the subject of homosexuality – and genuine sexual frankness and tolerance.
The audience laughed a great deal, and so did I. But I left the theatre feeling – as I often do, after Mr Lawton’s comic performances – that my giggle-buttons had been massaged in a particularly mechanical and unpleasant way.
At the Astoria in Edinburgh, Theatre Alba are rounding off their eight-week season with Strindberg’s Swan White, a graceful Nordic fairy tale about a sweet young princess, a handsome prince, and a wicked stepmother.
On the whole, Charles Nowosielski’s season in this unpromisingly tatty and barn-like venue has been a considerable triumph of enterprise and imagination, and Swan White has all the characteristics of his work at its best – a fearless romanticism and lyricism, slow but powerful sense of pace, vivid and symbolic use of visual images and tableaux, of lighting, music, and simple but effective design. The actors involved in this little ensemble are also working together with increasing skill and confidence.
My only reservation about Theatre Alba’s work is that their interest in the romantic, the metaphysical, the fey and the supernatural is developing into something of an obsession. Nowosielski has proved himself over the last few years to be one of the most gifted and probably the most original young director working in Scotland. What he needs now, although it seems unlikely he’ll get it, is the chance to work not with a small band of devotees, but with a strong, confident company of established actors.
With a skirl of the pipes and not a few swinging kilts, the exquisite new Festival Theatre at Pitlochry launched its summer season this week; and the gala opening on Friday was graced by an attractive and competent production of The Lady’s Not for Burning. Thirty-four years after its first performance, Christopher Fry’s romantic post-war journey through a mock-medieval neverland of English metaphor and blank verse seems more of a charming curiosity than anything else; it has far too many characters, is unconscionably long, and suffers, in this slightly lethargic production by Brian Shelton, from too reverent an approach to Fry’s wild, indulgent cascades of poetic speech.
However, the audience at Pitlochry obviously loved it, for the lyrical simplicity of the story, which deals with suspected witchcraft and the redeeming power of romantic love, for the rich exuberance of the verse, and for Deborah Fairfax’s exceptionally intense and beautifully spoken performance as the lovely supposed witch, Jennet.
The 7:84 Company’s Clydebuilt season of working-class plays from the 1920s, ’30s and ’40s rolled to a tantalising conclusion this week with a production, by Giles Havergal of Glasgow Citizens’ Theatre, of Men Should Weep, a particularly powerful drama about a woman struggling to bring up her family in a Glasgow tenement during the depression of the 1930s.
Giles Havergal’s production represents a fascinating, if not entirely successful, attempt to marry the straightforward naturalism of Scottish working-class drama with the stylised theatrical approach developed by the Glasgow Citizens’ company over the past twelve years.
In true Citizens’ style, the actors strut majestically around the stage, changing character at the drop of a hat; they spend much of their time looking meaningfully into the audience, and the rest draped around the grey rubble and ruined walls of Geoff Rose’s set, gazing banefully at the action.
The result is an intensely absorbing piece of theatre, which demands total concentration from both actors and audience, and produced some stunning performances from the cast of seven women and two men.
For all its theatrical force and impact, though, Havergal’s production seems to me to be marred by some uncharacteristic lapses of insight in relation to the play itself. While the thinking behind the set design is perfectly clear – it anticipates the eventual disintegration and destruction of the whole tenement way of life – in fact it does nothing, symbolically, to illuminate the central theme of the play, which is the economic and physical power of men over women, the emotional and sexual power of women over men, and the more, or less, civilised way in which the two are traded off, under conditions of extreme stress.
On a more practical level, it evokes the ruins of Berlin in 1945 more effectively than the lively squalor of a Glasgow slum in the 1930s, and goes a long way – together with the fierce, non-naturalistic acting style – towards flattening and destroying the precise sense of time, place and closely observed character which is so important in Ena Lamont Stewart’s text.
Despite its shortcomings, though, Men Should Weep is by far the most interesting and significant production of the Clydebuilt season. If it had been the first of the four, rather than the last, it might have set the whole project off on an infinitely more challenging course. As it is, it simply whets the appetite for new, sophisticated and exciting theatrical approaches to traditional Scottish material.
Arriving at the Traverse Theatre Club last Saturday afternoon to watch the whole of John Byrne’s famous Slab Boys Trilogy in one day, I had no idea what I was letting myself in for. John Byrne has always claimed that his long-running story of Phil and Spanky, slab-room apprentices at A.F. Stobo’s Paisley carpet factory, their little bespectacled sidekick Hector, and the lovely Lucille Bentley (‘every slab boy’s dream’) would eventually amount to a big, old-fashioned three-act drama, but I couldn’t help wondering whether seven solid hours of Byrne’s quick-fire, aggressive Paisley wit and frantic slapstick wouldn’t seem too much of a good thing.
But by 12.30 a.m., when the exhausted company took the final bows at the end of Byrne’s latest play Still Life, there were a hundred hot, sweaty and delighted people in the audience who needed no convincing about the stature of Byrne’s work. There are plenty of rough edges and minor misjudgements both in the plays and in David Hayman’s production, but basically, seen together and whole, the Slab Boys Trilogy is a theatrical triumph.
Cuttin’ a Rug [the second part] is a less substantial play, but in this superbly staged production there is a good-looking, fast-moving and hilariously funny evocation of the A.F. Stobo Christmas dance, with a sickeningly violent twist in the tail when reality breaks in on Phil and Spanky’s drunken night out. And Still Life, the final play of the three, makes a hesitant but interesting conclusion to the story, aiming for – if not quite achieving – a completely new mood of realism and calm.
But taken together, these three plays weld into something much greater than the sum of their parts – a strong, memorable moving drama about two fairly ordinary Scottish lads and the extraordinary difficulty they experience in growing up. Scotswomen are fond of saying that their menfolk are ‘just big weans’; what Byrne’s trilogy does is to examine the sad, funny and in some ways tremendously theatrical roots of that refusal to ‘grow up’ and ‘stop playing games’.
If the plays and production have a fault it is, I think, partly because the actors, the director, and Byrne himself, are obviously so close to the characters in the play. Like Phil at the end of Still Life – when we see him groping towards an adult idea of himself as a husband and father – they are just beginning to reach out beyond the clichés of Scottish male comic acting towards something much more real and much more adult – politically, sexually and emotionally. The ideas Byrne is handling are so topical, and so psychologically relevant, that the performances almost visibly grow and develop under the audience’s eyes.
Officially, this pre-Festival week on the Fringe has been known as Week Zero, a bleak title which seems, somehow, rather appropriate. To be sure, the Fringe Festival has started: the two huge ‘supervenues’ at the Assembly Rooms and the Circuit have got their huge operations more or less efficiently underway, and audiences have materialised in respectable numbers. But the weather has been grey and cold and windy, and the real Festival atmosphere has been sadly missed.
Which is not to say, of course, that there have not been some very fine shows on view in Edinburgh this week. The Traverse Theatre Club in the Grassmarket has always been at the very heart of the Fringe; and on Thursday evening the little theatre was packed for the opening of Glasgow poet Liz Lochhead’s first full-length play, Blood and Ice – a passionate, intense and poetic study of the relationship between Mary Shelley, her husband the poet, and their friend Lord Byron, of the creation of Mary’s great novel Frankenstein, and of the implications of her story for modern ideas about equal relationships between the sexes, and about the liberation of women.
I dare say there were a few in the audience who were a little disappointed by the occasion, for in this production by Kenny Ireland, Blood and Ice certainly looks far from perfect. Some of the scenes seem uncomfortably poised between the horrible and the ridiculous.
But for me, Blood and Ice emerges from its weak moments, its moments of bathos and its moments of confusion as a really magnificent debut. Lochhead is not exactly an accomplished playwright and certainly not a tidy one, but she possesses the tremendous, vital dramatic gift of going straight for the jugular.
The question in Blood and Ice is the vital and acutely modern one of whether women, bound in blood and pain and love to the business of childbearing, can ever become truly free without becoming frozen monsters of cold reason; and when, at the end of the play, Mary Shelley – struggling to freeze out the painful memories of her drowned husband, her miscarriages, her three dead children – turns to the audience and cries, ‘Will the ice save me?’, we can see that Lochhead’s answer is a sad, and heavily qualified, no.
So the landscape begins to emerge, in these first years of reviews: the brilliance of the Citizens’, the link it offered to the wider world of European theatre, the battle against ‘dead’ theatre wherever I saw it, the emergence of the young poet Liz Lochhead as a serious and powerful playwright. These years also saw the coming of Gerry Mulgrew’s Communicado, which married a European repertoire and performance style with a darkly Scottish sensibility in a way that seemed entirely new, and was to reach a climax in 1987 with their acclaimed production of Liz Lochhead’s Mary Queen of Scots Got Her Head Chopped Off. And 1983 marked the first year of Glasgow’s Mayfest, which emerged during the 1980s as a hugely influential international festival of popular theatre and music, helping to redefine the city, and becoming an important counterweight, in Scotland, to the mighty Edinburgh International Festival and Fringe.
In the summer of 1983 the Sunday Standard ceased publication, and I was approached by Patrick Ensor of The Guardian to become their Scottish theatre critic, writing mainly – in those days – for the northern, Manchester-based editions. For me, the job was something of a dream come true; and given the angry, self-interrogating mood of the Guardian-reading British left in the 1980s, it demanded a much sharper confrontation with what was right, and wrong, about what passed for radical theatre in Britain. Which is perhaps why my first Guardian review of 1984 focused on 7:84 Scotland, and its latest show about the NHS; although by the end of the year, I also had the Scottish Theatre Company firmly in my sights, and was beginning an argument around the STC, and its repertoire, which was to last until the company disbanded three years later.
Every now and again, a new play appears which is so perfect, so timely, so uniquely eloquent in its appeal to audiences, that it soon ceases to seem ‘new’ at all; it slips quietly into the standard repertoire of the English-speaking stage as if it had always, and inevitably, been there. C.P. Taylor’s Good – one of the last plays written by this unassumingly brilliant Glasgow-born playwright before his premature death in 1981, and now receiving its first Scottish production at Perth Theatre – is a play of that rare calibre; and despite some severe limitations in the quality of the acting and the detail of the direction, Joan Knight’s heartfelt and powerful production at Perth emerges as a wonderful piece of theatre, effective, entertaining, and in the end almost stunning in its emotional impact.
Simply put, Good is a well-made lyrical piece about a German intellectual called Halder – an affectionate, thoughtful, slightly ineffectual man, approaching middle life, struggling through the difficult years of the 1930s, and finding himself increasingly entangled in the evil power structures of Hitler’s Third Reich.
As a piece of thoroughly modern theatre, it is a play with almost everything. It has music and laughter and a superb central metaphor; it is simply staged, economic and flexible in its theatrical style, refreshingly direct in its approach to the audience; the subjects with which it deals – the moral patterns of human love, the relationship between these private concerns and the larger questions of political morality, and the terrifying inadequacy of private, individual solutions in combating organised evil – could hardly be more important; and they are explored here with a combination, absolutely characteristic of C.P. Taylor, of clear-sighted realism, and almost transfiguring love for the human race – with all its weaknesses and confusions.
For me, Perth Theatre’s production of this marvellously humane and thought-provoking play is a theatrical event of quite outstanding significance, and one which will enrich the life of everyone who shares it; for those who are unable to beat a path to the lovely theatre at Perth over the next two weeks, Good transfers to Glasgow Theatre Club at the Tron for six days from 22 March.
Down in the Gorbals, the Glasgow Citizens’ Company is at it again, resurrecting a sensational sex-and-violence melodrama from the tail-end of the Jacobean period, and serving it up to an astonished audience with posturing, flouncing and shrieking.
This time, the company has hit on a particularly lewd and unpleasant piece – attributed to the playwrights Fletcher and Massinger – called The Custom of the Country.
A sweet young couple called Arnoldo and Zenocia, fleeing their native land to preserve her from the nasty local custom which allows the wicked Count to deflower likely looking maidens on their wedding nights, find themselves in a neighbouring country dominated in an equally unpleasant manner by fierce and sexually voracious women. Poor Arnoldo is almost ‘raped’ by the first lady he meets, and his randy brother Rutilio reduced to exhaustion by the insatiable female clients of the local brothel.
The plot, as you can see, is nonsensical, and most of it passed me by completely; but Robert David MacDonald, who directs, has hit on the clever and witty idea of presenting this land of man-eating matriarchs as a kind of spoof Hollywood, peopled with larger-than-life Mae Wests, Bette Davises and Baby Janes. The result is a hugely entertaining, sustained send-up of all the clichés and mannerisms of American movies in their heyday.
Heaven knows, and I shudder to think, what Robert David MacDonald thinks he might be saying about relationships between men and women, and how they ought to be organised. In that direction, the cynicism both of this production and of the play itself is total and frightening. But as a funny, tasteless and thoroughly outrageous commentary on popular drama – on how it first exaggerates human emotions, then debases them, then ends up poking fun at them – The Custom of the Country works tremendously well.
The production of Robert David MacDonald’s new play Webster, which opened at the Citizens’ Theatre on Thursday, marks the end of an exhausting winter season for the company. Since September, the Citizens’ has mounted no fewer than eleven full-scale productions, hacking its way – with its own inimitable combination of flair, inspiration and sheer impertinence – through a huge chunk of the theatrical canon.
The intellectual brilliance which underlies its productions, the visual brilliance of its presentation, and the literary quality of the texts with which it works, still places the Citizens’ company in a class of its own among Scottish theatre groups – and indeed among all Britain’s regional theatres.
Nevertheless, the company has its artistic problems; and one of the most worrying is a continuing tendency to become absorbed in the examination of its own navel – to function at its best, in other words, when dealing with the distinctly minority-interest subject of theatre itself.
The Citizens’ resident man of letters, MacDonald, has produced another backstage drama – this time centred on the enigmatic figure of the Jacobean playwright John Webster, author of those dark, lurid tragedies The Duchess of Malfi and The White Devil.
MacDonald is interested in examining the curious, haphazard and sometimes dangerous process by which great art can emerge from the most unpromising and banal circumstances. He pictures Webster as a bitter, intelligent, unhappy man, estranged from his wife, blighted by the fact that his only son is a pathetic, brain-damaged idiot, forced to write what he believes to be dreadful plays in order to earn a living, and saddened – as well as inspired – by a desperate, tender, unrequited passion for one of the young actors in the company for which he scribbles.
Out of this almost tragic situation, MacDonald generates a surprisingly entertaining play, full of sharply comic backstage chat, as well as a gentler kind of humour, and some wisdom; I admired the acuteness of his observation, the sensitivity and literacy of the writing, and the particularly fine performances of Ciarán Hinds as Webster, Jane Bertish as his wife, Ron Donachie as a bad-tempered heavyweight actor, and Laurance Rudic as the harassed company manager.
I find MacDonald’s painfully honest observations on the art of theatre absorbing and moving, and I’m also excited by the way in which the Citizens’ Company seems increasingly willing to open itself to the dangers of exploring real emotion on stage. Whether the man or woman on the Glasgow bus can be expected to give a damn, though – about the art of theatre, the torments of the poet, the jealousies of actors, and the painful absurdities of the creative process – I’m not altogether sure.
The first time I saw Giles Havergal’s production of Men Should Weep for the 7:84 Company, I had an urge to leave the auditorium shouting ‘I have seen the future, and it works!’
Almost a year on from that opening night at the Mitchell Theatre, Glasgow, it seems increasingly clear that this immensely successful and acclaimed production, which is now beginning a two-week run at Glasgow Citizens’ Theatre, to be followed by a tour which will visit almost every major theatre in Scotland, marks a vital turning point in the story of Scottish theatre.
As dozens of delighted critics have pointed out, it brings the tradition of gritty, naturalistic drama about Scottish working-class life into a new and thrilling partnership with the bold, flexible and stylish approach which the Citizens’ Theatre Company has been developing over the past decade. It also marks the moment when John McGrath’s remarkable 7:84 touring company began to come in from the cold, and to think in terms of production which could cope with, and fill, Scotland’s greatest theatres.
But perhaps most importantly, Men Should Weep is a show which demonstrates the importance of top-class, home-grown touring productions in the future of Scottish theatre. For despite the initial failure of the Scottish Theatre Company to get off the ground, it seems likely that this kind of major production – drawing on many of the finest talents at work in theatre in this country, toured and matured over a long period, and attracting, in time, a very large audience in communities all over Scotland – has a better chance of paying its way. It should also satisfy a sophisticated modern audience more than a hastily produced rep production, which disappears after two or three weeks on the boards.
At the moment, though, the production itself seems in rather fragile condition. The women in the cast – strutting and posing in their dusty black costumes against the fierce, ruinous tenements of Geoff Rose’s set – are as fine as ever. But Patrick Hannaway, newly cast as the harassed, unemployed father-of-seven John Morrison, has difficulty in coping with the smooth transitions between the tragic and the comic, the sharply stylised and the gently naturalistic, which this tremendously taxing production demands of its actors.
Meanwhile, out on the road, there seems no shortage of bright young companies willing to continue the tradition of small-scale touring which 7:84 has done so much to develop. In Aberdeen and Edinburgh this week, you can catch up with the Communicado Theatre Company, which is on tour with a powerful, inventive stage version of The House with Green Shutters, George Douglas’s doleful novel about life in a mean wee Scottish town towards the end of the nineteenth century.
Against the odds, Communicado has succeeded in turning the tale of the dour and horrible Gourlay family into as effective a piece of theatre as you could wish to see, full of colourful, larger-than-life characters, ingeniously staged for a cast of six, and accompanied throughout by superb, jangly original music.
It’s difficult for anyone who cherishes the idea of a National Health Service to review a show like Wildcat’s latest rock cabaret Bedpan Alley. Premiered in Scotland last week, due to arrive at London’s Shaw Theatre on Tuesday, it’s a straightforward piece of pro-NHS propaganda, in the form of a slick, ninety-minute revue.
Surrounded, as usual, by their paraphernalia of keyboards and speakers, whisking in and out of overalls and white coats and mortuary bags, the cast of five move smartly through a series of songs and sketches touching on every aspect of the NHS spending cuts, from the privatisation of laundry contracts, through nurses’ wages, to the apparent class bias of death itself.
As usual, the performances range from the passable to the excellent (Elaine C. Smith, David Anderson); the music – composed by Anderson and the whole cast – is strong and unexpectedly varied, featuring a smashing doo-wop sequence for a big-shot consultant and his acolytes, a rumba for two cleaning ladies, and a doom-laden final rallying song against the blandishments of Thatcherite propaganda. ‘Agitprop, agitprop,’ sing the company fervently. ‘Don’t give me bullshit, give me truth.’
But the trouble with Wildcat, here as in so many other shows, is that they don’t have the application and the intellectual energy to go looking for anything as big, disturbing and complex as the truth. They counter propaganda with more propaganda, selected facts with differently selected facts; and on the level of original thinking, new ideas, and the development of them through a sustained and coherent piece of dramatic writing, Bedpan Alley is a lazy and superficial piece of work. It never raises its sights beyond the simple point-scoring that can be achieved in a three-minute sketch, and caricatures its opponents in a way that makes effective confrontation with their ideas impossible.
Heaven knows what a dyed-in-the-wool Tory would have made of it all, but I wouldn’t have missed the Mayfest premiere of 7:84 Scotland’s Ragged Trousered Philanthropists for anything: it was an unforgettable theatrical and political occasion, and small wonder.
Here, after all, was an adaptation of a great socialist classic, opening in front of a packed and overwhelmingly sympathetic audience in a great Labour city, on a day when half the town had apparently been striking and marching in support of the miners.
Inventively and sympathetically directed by David Hayman, and performed with tremendous exuberance by a company of sturdy and familiar Scottish actors, Robert Tressell’s straightforward, powerful story about the sufferings of a group of poor tradesmen in Edwardian England was simply carried along on an immense surge of audience response, spontaneous laughter, and political recognition; and when, at the end, the company moved in unison to throw their Mayfest red carnations back into the cheering audience, the whole event seemed like a kind of apotheosis of what Glasgow’s people’s festival is supposed to be about.
But the problem with occasions like this is that their success belongs at least as much to the audience as to the production, and it’s difficult to tell just how well this version of the Stephen Lowe adaptation – now translated into Scots by Archie Hind – would survive a damp night, a small hall, and a sluggish audience.
Lowe’s version of the story is certainly clear, imaginative and theatrical enough – he introduces an almost Dickensian element of caricature and nightmare into his portrayal of boss/worker relations – but it’s undeniably a little stodgy and static in terms of plot and character development.
But the overwhelming advantage of the Scottish version is that it frees David Hayman’s tremendous company – one actress, seven actors – to perform and communicate naturally, in their own Scots voices; and Hayman has brilliantly exploited this freedom, and the theatrical sophistication of Lowe’s adaptation, in allowing the company to drop out of character from time to time, to busk and perform their way almost acrobatically through the scene-changes, to make tremendous little comic sketches out of some of the play’s tougher theoretical passages.
These episodes not only swing delightfully through some of its duller patches; they also develop a sense of unity and teamwork among the company, which itself acts as a metaphor for the joyful solidarity among workers of which the socialist hero, Owen, dreams, but which his apathetic little bunch of workmen can never quite achieve. In the end, it’s that living example of solidarity and combined effort that the audience applauds, as much as Tressell’s socialist message; and if the 7:84 company can preserve that precious quality in their performance, they should make an impression on infinitely tougher and much less sympathetic audiences.
Let’s first say everything nice that there is to say about the Scottish Theatre Company’s production of Bruce Daillie’s Battle Royal, which opened this week at Pitlochry Festival Theatre, before an extensive Scottish tour. The play is a jolly, rollicking comedy set in sixteenth-century Fife, and concerns the habit of the then King of Scots, James V, of passing among his subjects incognito.
The plot revolves around an encounter between the supposed monarch, a rapacious Fife laird called Glendrum, and the laird’s three comely unmarried daughters. The first two acts are brisk and neatly structured, and the whole piece, which dates from the early 1960s, is written in a refreshingly crude and vigorous brand of non-academic broad Scots.
The production, directed by Phil McCall with a small cast of seven, radiates a rare quality of confident, buoyant professionalism, and is designed by Helen Wilkinson. It boasts three performances from John Grieve, John Shedden and Juliet Cadzow which are droll, skilful, and theatrically adroit, and I dare say most of those involved would say that Battle Royal is simply a harmless piece of fun.
But in this, they deceive themselves. The kind of fun peddled in Battle Royal is not harmless; it is reactionary, divisive, and fundamentally damaging to Scottish life. Far from cutting through to the kind of fundamental truth, tragic or comic, that unites human beings, it depends on finding a certain limited audience, old enough not to be offended by the crude sexism on which much of the play’s humour depends, and unsophisticated enough not to be disturbed by the stereotypes of Scottish character and manners which it offers.
To see any company indulging in this kind of easy audience exploitation is annoying; to see an organisation called the Scottish Theatre Company doing it – and at such expense of talent, skill and goodwill – is both sad and frustrating.
The Scottish Theatre Company is one of those theatrical organisations that believes the end justifies the means: put on a tripey ‘popular’ show like our current production of Battle Royal, they seem to argue, and it helps to pay for worthwhile projects like this long-awaited Scottish premiere of Marcella Evaristi’s Commedia, which opened at Edinburgh’s King’s Theatre on Tuesday before a short Scottish tour. And whatever one may think of the long-term implications of such a policy, it’s certainly possible to give an unqualified welcome to the company’s intense and highly emotional production of Commedia, a quintessential Scottish play by a young Scottish writer, which first appeared in Sheffield in 1982.
Commedia is a big, sweeping domestic drama about the rumpus caused in a Glasgow Italian family when their recently widowed Mamma strikes up a passionate affair with an Italian student twenty-five years her junior. As contemporary drama goes, it has some rare and refreshing qualities. For one thing, it’s a rattling good well-crafted yarn, in which the story of the delightful Elena’s affair is carefully woven into her developing relationship with her two spoilt grown-up sons and their wives; and the whole action builds to a sensational dramatic climax with the ghastly 1980 bomb incident at Bologna railway station.
For another, it is an uncompromisingly female play, stuffed with painfully acute observations of contemporary women’s lives, which, nevertheless, owes nothing to the stark style of committed feminist theatre, and rather seems to draw its inspiration from the epic sweep and lush emotional landscape of popular women’s literature, of the romantic novel and the high-class soap opera.
In the end, disappointingly, it also shares some of the limitations of those genres. The characterisation is sketchy and too often stereotyped, and the observation of contemporary sexual behaviour – brilliant and witty though it is – is not matched by the kind of patient investigation into deeper motives which might give the play lasting value. But there is no gainsaying the force with which it speaks to a contemporary audience, the laughs and little cheers of recognition it draws from them, or – despite some surprisingly nervy and superficial direction from the playwright herself, with Michael Boyd – the fierce impact of Anne Kristen’s raw and deeply felt performance as Elena. This is a thunderingly clever, observant and moving piece of popular drama, acted – in the end – with real conviction.
The Traverse Theatre had been going through a period of recovery in the early 1980s, following a severe financial crisis. In 1985, though, there was a sudden upsurge in energy, as Jenny Killick arrived at the theatre, first as associate, then as artistic director, bringing with her another director, Stephen Unwin, and a whole generation of brilliant young writers and actors – the actors included Simon Russell Beale, Tilda Swinton and Kate Duchêne, among others. She brought a new wave of European work to the Traverse stage, and found a generation of Scottish-based writers – Chris Hannan, Peter Arnott, Jo Clifford (then John Clifford) – desperate to escape from the world of the naturalistic ‘sofa’ play, and to write shows with an epic and international sweep; and the voice of theatre in Scotland began to evolve again, in an exciting direction.
As the Traverse looked to a fresh generation of new work, though, there was also an impulse to revisit aspects of Scotland’s dramatic and creative past. The young Scottish director Charles Nowosielski, and his company Theatre Alba, began to explore the great Scots-language tradition of folk legends and Border Ballads, filtering a whole range of neglected songs, poems and stories through an intensely visual, erotic and international theatre aesthetic that transformed perceptions. And in 1985 the Scottish Theatre Company commissioned the great Tom Fleming to direct a production of Scotland’s defining piece of classic drama, Ane Satyre of the Thrie Estaitis, which dates from the 1540s. My view of that production shifted remarkably during its two-year life. But now, at this distance, I wonder whether it was the show that was changing; or myself, the young critic, gradually learning to love a great classic of European drama that I had never encountered before.
Robert McLellan – at seventy-eight, the doyen of Scottish dramatists – is a playwright with many subjects, and only one theme: Scotland’s culture, Scotland’s language, and the gradual erosion of both through centuries of English domination. His historical drama Jamie the Saxt – recently revived by the Scottish Theatre Company – presents a vivid idealised image of Scotland as she might have been in her last decade as an independent kingdom; his later comedy The Flouers o Edinburgh, now given a warm, vigorous and handsomely proportioned revival at Perth Theatre, is set in the eighteenth-century aftermath of the Act of Union and the Jacobite Rebellion, and shows Scottish society reeling under the first full impact of ‘British’ culture and galloping anglicisation.
The plot revolves around the fortunes of a young laird (or squire) called Chairlie (or Charles) Gilchrist, who returns from his Grand Tour with a set of excruciating half-anglicised vowels, and an unshakeable conviction that English is the language of the future; his wooing of a stoutly Scottish lass called Kate, his various contretemps with his crusty old father Lord Stanebyres and Kate’s sensible aunt Lady Athelstane, and his frantic attempts to get himself elected to the Westminster parliament, provide ample scope for hilarious linguistic and cultural clashes.
On the whole, the cheap and patronising temptation to play up to the anachronisms in the text – to act as if the old Scots language were comical in itself – is well resisted in Ron Bain’s bright and open-minded production at Perth, which features an excellent cast led by the delightful Paul Young – who gives a performance of exemplary wit, integrity and invention as the young Gilchrist – and by Roy Hanlon in the plum role of Lady Athelstane’s house-proud servingman, Jock.
In the end, in their best moments, they rise above the traditional clichés of Scots comedy into a genuine and rewarding cultural rapport with their audience; which seems to suggest that, despite the slow linguistic ravages so painstakingly charted by McLellan, the idea of a distinctive Scottish culture is not quite dead yet.
How Noël Coward ever acquired the reputation of a sly and heartless wit is beyond me; he must have been one of the most disgraceful romantics ever to wield a pen. The theme of his spiritualist comedy Blithe Spirit is love, love, love, or at any rate an erotic obsession powerful enough to survive the grave, and last, as the song succinctly puts it, ‘Always’; the best joke in the play lies in poor old Condomine’s inability to ignore the blandishments and tantrums of his first wife Elvira, even when his heated response to her pouting ghost causes him nothing but social and marital embarrassment.
Its failure to be quite bold enough with this unquenchable fascination between Condomine and the undead Elvira is just part of the profound ordinariness of Giles Havergal’s production of Blithe Spirit, which brings the Citizens’ company back to earth with a bump, after last month’s remarkable Mary Stuart. Despite an eccentric and pretentious set by Kenny Miller, which surrounds the plush upholstery of the Condomines’ drawing room with a clutter of Second World War bomb damage and sandbags, all painted an improbable shade of turquoise, the production emerges as nothing more than run-of-the-mill repertoire Coward.
On one hand, there’s Anne Lambton’s assured and suitably irresponsible Elvira, and a fine little cameo from Geraldine Hinds as the psychic maid, Edith. On the other, there’s Fidelis Morgan’s second Mrs Condomine, a little too mannered and emphatic to be entirely effective; Ciarán Hinds’ attractive Condomine, nervy and ever so slightly inaudible; and Linda Spurrier who, as an unusually slim and youthful Madame Arcati, makes a generous stab at the beguiling ragbag of traits that make up that marvellous character without quite scoring a comic bullseye.
The evening moves stylishly enough to a witty conclusion, with searchlights raking the auditorium as the crump of a well-placed bomb blasts Condomine over to ‘the other side’, and into the arms of his waiting wives. But somewhere – perhaps in this cast’s relative inexperience with lightsome and lightweight comedy – there’s a bumpy, uneasy feeling, as though the production’s comic gears were just failing to mesh.
By modern theatrical standards, this new version of Bram Stoker’s Dracula – adapted for the Royal Lyceum Company by the Scottish poet and playwright Liz Lochhead – is an astonishingly brave and ambitious piece of work. It lasts for three and a half hours, and attempts full-length portraits of no fewer than eight major characters, from the Westermann sisters and their admirers Seward and Harker to Dracula the vampire himself. It delves deep beneath the psychosexual surface of Stoker’s story in an attempt to marry his imagery with modern ideas about women’s sexuality; its language is a daring and often highly successful mixture of domestic naturalism and high melodrama, pun, alliteration, and pure poetry.
It avoids the spoofs, send-ups and cheap celluloid horrors we’ve come to associate with Dracula, and handles the story with an almost disturbing emotional directness. Its mood emphasises the pure tragedy of Dracula’s exile from human happiness, and Stoker’s powerful intuition – expressed here through the atmosphere of Seward’s horrible Victorian asylum – that the cruelty, bloodthirstiness and arrogance of the vampire underworld reflect human life.
It’s hardly surprising, given the scale of the project, that both play and production have substantial faults. Director Hugh Hodgart is much to blame for the inordinate length of the performance, for its indulgent pace and initial lack of narrative drive; the long early arias of the lunatic Renfield, for example, are dangerously overwritten and overplayed, and would have twice the impact at a quarter the length. And faced with a script that demands both melodramatic force and heartfelt emotional realism, Hodgart has not quite succeeded in harnessing them within a consistent performance style.
But John McGlynn’s Dracula is a superb, restrained piece of work, strong, sad and sexy. Sean McCarthy takes the right kinds of emotional risks with his great adversary, the histrionic Van Helsing; and Patricia Ross’s matronly Mina Westermann comes close to striking exactly the right naturalistic note.
In the programme note to this British premiere of Through the Leaves – a powerful and exquisite two-hander by the Bavarian playwright Franz Xavier Kroetz, which opens the Traverse Theatre Company’s enterprising 1985 season – director Jenny Killick suggests that ‘the theory of alienation is strong in Kroetz’s work… and each form of alienation is focused in the failure to communicate.’
It’s true that there is, in this funny and poignant study of an ill-fated love-affair between a fortyish lady butcher and a graceless boor of a slightly younger man, an occasional hint of the style of England’s own post-war poet of noncommunication, Harold Pinter. There is the grubby, unglamorous setting – in this case the back shop of a Bavarian tripe-butchery, meticulously recreated in the tiny space of the Traverse’s downstairs theatre; there are the long silences, and the sad, comical conversations at cross-purposes.
But there, the similarity ends; for Kroetz approaches the problem of alienation in a much more political and combative frame of mind than the cold-eyed Pinter. Not content with simply observing the failure of a relationship, he goes out of his way (through the device of Martha’s diary, to which she confesses her romantic and half-baked hopes for the relationship) to show us the real human qualities which are frustrated and crushed by her experiences with a man so locked into tough, insensitive clichés of male behaviour that his rejection of love, and brutalisation of sex, has become an automatic reflex.
It speaks volumes, though, for the subtlety and compassion of Kroetz’s writing that while this sympathetic focus on Martha’s inner life reveals some pointed feminist truths about the relative roles of men and women in sustaining civilised relationships, the man himself never seems less than human, sad and pitiable; and the actor Ken Stott, playing Otto in the gruff, non-committal accents of the west of Scotland, perfectly captures that sense of perverted and stunted humanity.
It’s difficult, in fact, to fault any aspect of Jenny Killick’s perfectly paced production, with its combination of powerful, concrete naturalism and understated theatricality, forged through the intensely sympathetic relationship between the audience and Eileen Nicholas’s luminous Martha.
But in the end, the evening must belong to Kroetz himself; to the breathtaking economy and ruthless accuracy with which he makes his simple story reach out to encompass the pain of modern living, and to ask us to consider the key question of what it is about our society that makes loving so difficult, and brutality so easy.
Joe Corrie’s In Time o’ Strife – first performed in Fife in 1927, revived by 7:84 Scotland three years ago, and now revived again to form a dramatic centrepiece of this year’s Mayfest – is not one of those working-class plays that presents the case for socialism. It’s a biased, affectionate and essentially non-analytic account of life in a Fife pit village towards the bitter end of the 1926 miners’ strike; last winter’s industrial agony in the coalfields has lent a painful familiarity to the political and moral landscape it describes, but it would take a massively single-minded theatre company – with a ruthless and cavalier attitude to the text – to turn Corrie’s ambivalent observations of the aftermath of an industrial dispute into a straightforward piece of socialist polemic.
David Hayman’s new version of the play – which plays at the Citizens’ Theatre throughout Mayfest – is both enterprising and attractively staged; but it has the uncomfortable look of a production that has set out on that triumphantly socialist road, hesitated, and lost its way. He and his designer Geoff Rose have clearly intended to shape and stylise the play and to clarify its message; the action is set not in a carefully reconstructed cottage kitchen but in a bleak symbolic playing area surrounded by pit tunnels, dominated by high platforms and great, sinister pithead wheels.
But if the aim was to present the play as convincing piece of political rhetoric, then Hayman has apparently failed to involve the whole of his acting company in the enterprise. His well-chosen and exciting ensemble of Scottish actors seem to be pulling in different ideological and stylistic directions: Tom Watson’s bravura comic performance as the miner Jock Smith – knowing, cynical, and quite anti-political – might be in a different production from Anne Kristen’s warmly heroic portrayal of his wife, Jean. And the result is a production that seems to have lost the warm, explanatory texture of naturalistic theatre, without gaining any thematic force or clarity.
Set in a Glasgow tenement during the great women’s rent strike of 1915, Chris Hannan’s new play Elizabeth Gordon Quinn, which opened at the Traverse Theatre this week, is billed as dealing with ‘the role of art and personal values at the time of the decay of the British Empire,’ and with the state of a family – the remarkable and eccentric Quinns – blessed with ‘an imagination they can ill afford’.
In fact, though, imagination as a positive force hardly figures in the play. Instead, there is a witty but ultimately depressing study of imagination as an escape route from reality. Hannan’s astonishing heroine, Mrs Quinn – a memorable bravura performance from Eileen Nicholas – is no tenement martyr to artistic truth and freedom, but a monster of working-class false consciousness.
In the early scenes, Hannan’s witty script makes an amusing job of satirising Mrs Quinn’s pretensions, and exploding the romantic myths of tenement solidarity. Dermot Hayes’ bright, unadorned set – a free-standing door there, a dusty window there – is spare and effective. The action cracks along at an impressive pace, and director Steve Unwin has the eccentric Quinns acting in the highly stylised, declaratory manner of characters in an expressionist farce.
But when the plot becomes complicated by the sudden departure of the second Mr Quinn, and the increasing impoverishment and isolation of Mrs Quinn, both writer and director lose their sureness of touch. As the more ‘realistic’ characters of friends and neighbours gain weight and credibility, the idea that the heroine exists in a psychological world of her own becomes an obstacle to real dialogue, and decisive plot development. Despite an exquisite and impressive performance from Irene Macdougall as a dedicated rent-strike organiser, the play never matures into a wholehearted critique of Mrs Quinn’s political inadequacy; nor does the heroine herself emerge as a credible advocate of the individual imagination, against the grim-faced realpolitik of the strike organisers.
Even at its worst, Tom Fleming’s Scottish Theatre Company production of The Thrie Estaitis – revived at the Assembly Hall after its huge Festival success last year – always gave a useful impression of offering value for money. Here, after all, was a stage full of distinguished and well-known Scottish actors, an impressive yardage of gaudy costumes and banners, a live band, a big male voice choir, and a hefty dose of the old Scots tongue; altogether, a manageable couple of hours of solid yet palatable entertainment, that left behind it an agreeable impression of having seen something both highly prestigious, and undeniably Scottish. What more, in all conscience, could a prudent Edinburgh burgher expect from a theatrical experience, in the hungry 1980s?
The answer, of course, is that he might have expected a sense of purpose and passion, some feeling, on the part of the company, for the powerful structure and lasting significance of Sir David Lyndsay’s magnificent, exuberant and wonderfully human parable about the art of good government, both in the state and in the human heart; and last year, success or no, it seemed to many that that sense of shape and meaning, of an important story to tell, was sadly lacking in Tom Fleming’s spectacular but empty production.
It’s therefore a real delight to report that somehow, in the intervening twelve months, by some massive effort of will or miracle of theatrical chemistry, that vital missing ingredient seems to have been found. It may be something to do with Donald Douglas’s remarkably fine performance as Divine Correction, the commanding and Christ-like figure that stands at the play’s moral centre; but at any rate, what often looked, last year, like a series of couthy comic turns, a garish and expensive summer pantomime, has suddenly emerged as a thrilling, elegant, muscular and heartfelt account of one of the great plays of European literature.
The production still has its longueurs and little indulgences. The jokey casting of the voluminous Caroline Kaart Raitt as Dame Sensualitie still seems to me a fundamental mistake; the three vices – lovable Scots comics to their fingertips, as played by Walter Carr, John Grieve and Angus Lennie – are not sinister enough.
But on the whole, this new Thrie Estaitis offers a powerful momentum, plenty of strong, proud feeling for the play, and a whole clutch of richly enjoyable performances, from Edith Macarthur’s completely charming account of the Lady Chastitie, to the delightful, dissolute gambollings of the corrupt Lords Spiritual, led by that grandest old man of the Scottish stage, Andrew Cruickshank himself.
The Glasgow Citizens’ new production of Heartbreak House – which opened their 1985-86 season this weekend – is a world-class piece of theatre, beautiful, ambitious, intelligent, moving and breathtakingly timely. There is, in fact, a powerful and disturbing sense of inevitability about it, as if the apocalyptic mood of the mid-1980s, and the long moral development of the Citizens’ Company as chroniclers of European decadence, had somehow been destined to converge, this autumn, on Shaw’s brilliant old evocation – completed in the aftermath of the First World War – of a class of bright, cultivated, liberal and attractive people hopelessly disengaged from the levers of real power, toying with the complexities of sexual politics and cultivating their interest in the arts, while the boors and moneymen in government push the world relentlessly towards some sickening military holocaust.
For this vital production, director-designer Philip Prowse has created an astonishingly beautiful setting, opening out the Citizens’ stage into a huge, shimmering, summer-lit space, strewn with wicker tables and chairs, backed by the suggestion of a country-house façade, and shadowed by a great, rippling canopy that suggests both the richness of Virginia creeper and the blood-red of Flanders poppies. On it, he has assembled an outstanding cast of committed Citizens’ actors from the last decade and a half, including the company’s other two directors, Robert David MacDonald and Giles Havergal (unforgettable as the failed radical Mazzini Dunn), as well as Jane Bertish, Rupert Everett, Jill Spurrier and half a dozen others; and the sheer quality of the result stands as a tremendous tribute to the cumulative value of the company’s work over the years.
On the one hand, it makes Shaw’s wordy old text seem as if it had been freshly minted last week, so powerfully and intelligently do the cast grasp the contemporary significance of the spiritual situation Shaw describes; on the other, it has a depth, confidence and maturity that seems to indicate years rather than weeks of preparation, as if the company’s long experience as anatomists of cultural decline were supplying a unique depth to Shaw’s analysis.
But more than that: for the predominant mood of the production – captured in the autumnal beauty of the set – is neither clever nor bitter but elegiac; the Citizens’ Company, it seems, are ceasing to be the smart and chattering high priests of decadence, and maturing into sad, sophisticated and highly moral people, who understand the forces of decay, and would like – with playwrights like Shaw and Wilde – to believe in radical alternatives.
This Traverse premiere of Mario Vargas Llosa’s Kathie and the Hippopotamus – the first play by this acclaimed Peruvian playwright and novelist to be produced anywhere in Britain – is an event to be welcomed. Vargas Llosa is one of that brilliant new generation of Latin American writers whose work moves effortlessly from the most mundane social realities into all the competing realms of fantasy, memory and interpretation that make up the full human consciousness; and it is high time British audiences had the chance of enjoying the richness of this work.
Kathie and the Hippopotamus is a graceful, intricate and humorous piece of writing about a rich Peruvian banker’s wife who, bored witless by her comfortable life, has just been on an extended trip around the world; now, in the attic of her home in Lima, she is having a book about her adventures ‘ghosted’ for her by a hard-up writer and lecturer called Santiago.
In no time at all – under the influence of the ludicrous and prurient purple passages Santiago weaves round her standard tourist experiences – the pair of them are caught up in a fast-moving, criss-crossing fugue of fantasies about their respective banal lives. Hers involves troops of lovers, a moment of madness in which she shoots her boorish husband, and a strange African encounter with the prodigious sexuality of the male hippo. His are concentrated on a real or imaginary affair with a kittenish student called Adele, and a fatuous identification with the writer and radical hero Victor Hugo.
Bunny Christie has created an elegant and witty set – all plush carpeting, well-placed lamps, and little synthetic images of exotica like palm trees and pyramids; and there are beautifully pitched performances from Alan Barker and Kate Duchêne as Kathie’s handsome dimwit of a husband and Santiago’s long-suffering wife.
But Janet Amsden and Robert Swann, in the two leading roles, never quite get the measure of this complex play. For one thing, they do not, as yet, seem sure enough of the text to keep Vargas Llosa’s delicate interweaving of truth and fiction securely in place. More seriously, they seem unable in the end to grasp that the richness, completeness and humanity of the playwright’s vision depends on accepting the equal validity of all the levels of reality he explores.
Here, the actors send up the fantasy as if it was a joke, and play the naturalistic moments as if they represented an unpleasant truth; so the fabric of the play unravels into the spectacle of a pair of unpleasant people indulging in banal and exploitative fantasy. Unless something is done about it, audiences are likely to leave the Traverse with an impression of Vargas Llosa as a writer disgusted by mankind’s hypocrisy and cowardice, rather than moved by its plight; and that, I think, is to do the man less than justice.
The fundamental question about this best-known of all Joan Littlewood’s Theatre Workshop productions – and it’s one that Charles Nowosielski’s heartfelt but hasty-looking production at the Brunton Theatre hardly resolves – is whether, twenty-three years on, we still really need it.
It’s a show that was probably instrumental in creating the critical perspective on the First World War with which we now live; but after two solid decades of Wilfred Owen on the O-level syllabus, of Vera Brittain and Percy Toplis on the telly, of play after play after book of memoirs about horror in the trenches and blinkered idiocy at Allied High Command, its harsh anti-war tone runs the risk of sounding less like a necessary challenge to smug post-war patriotism, and more like the reiteration of a modern orthodoxy. At the Brunton, the programme even comes wrapped in a smart anti-nuclear brochure, produced by a consortium of Scottish local authorities.
For the first half of the evening, it certainly looks as though both the format and the message have become jaded and familiar beyond redemption. This is partly to do with the limitations of the production: Nowosielski’s young Scots company of ten actors, singers and musicians struggle to sustain what is, in effect, an evening’s music-hall entertainment with barely adequate singing voices, a scanty minimum of musical support, and a chaotic lighting plot which often leaves them groping around in impenetrable shadow.
But somehow, after the interval, the old, terrible fascination of the story begins to work. As the statistics projected on the backcloth become ever more mind-bendingly horrifying (one and a half million men killed in one battle at Verdun, early 1916), and the vacuous music-hall numbers give way to the dark humour of the men’s own songs, the ironic force and poignancy of the end-of-the-pier-show format become increasingly obvious.
In the end, the horror of the facts, the searing conviction of the young company, and the chilling continued relevance of the image of a crazed juggernaut of an economic system – that once sacrificed some fifteen million lives in order to create a market for some of its more obscene products – are too insistent to ignore.
This weekend, the Scottish Theatre Company’s increasingly magnificent production of the great Satyre of the Thrie Estaitis opened the proceedings of the International Theatre Meeting in Warsaw, wafted thither by public goodwill messages from Prince Charles and the Lord Provost of Glasgow, and by a creditable chunk of Scottish business sponsorship.
They were cheered on, too, by thunderous roars of approval from a near-capacity Thursday-night audience at Glasgow’s Theatre Royal, who were offered a brief glimpse of the latest version of Tom Fleming’s production, first seen at the Edinburgh Festival of 1984, before its departure. Never since Ally’s ill-fated army left Hampden for Argentina in 1978 can a Scottish team heading abroad have received such a rapturous send-off; and it’s pleasant to report that the omens seem a good deal better this time round.
For there is something strange and exciting about this production; now more than two years old, it simply grows stronger and better with every airing. Sir David Lyndsay’s satire, first seen in Edinburgh in 1540, is perhaps the only truly great play Scotland has ever produced, a magnificent, rounded, humorous and serious morality pageant about the state of the nation, the abuses of power, and the art of good government under God. Dating from the last century of Scotland’s existence as a nation in its own right, it combines a mature and confident grasp of universal political realities with a uniquely brilliant and complete evocation of the character of Scotland itself.
And it’s as if the sheer quality of the work has slowly had its effect on what began as a fairly ordinary and aimless-looking company of Scottish actors, welding them into a dazzling ninety-strong performing union (counting choristers, musicians and spear-carriers), passionate about the value of the play’s message, and proud of their unique ability to perform it.
This time round, Tom Fleming has had to remake his thrust-stage production for the proscenium arch of Warsaw’s Teatr Dramatyczny, losing a little in the great processional entrances (memorable designs for costumes, banners, cloth-of-gold settings by Nadine Bayliss), gaining something in presentation, attack, and intensity of lighting. The production has gained a fine, witty young King Humanitie in James Telfer, and a uniquely sturdy, popular and vehement John the Commonweal in Russell Hunter. And it retains – despite a slight faltering of energy in the opening scenes – its pace, its sweep, its elegance, the profound debt to Scottish pantomime humour in its lighter moments, and the deep central seriousness of Donald Douglas’s performance as Divine Correction, the messenger of true religion, come to right the nation’s wrongs.
In his long quest to bring Scots audiences into closer touch with the powerful, magical folklore of the medieval past, Charles Nowosielski has never unearthed a play more suited to his purposes than Netta Reid’s The Shepherd Beguiled, which he presents as the final production of his autumn season at the Brunton Theatre in Musselburgh.
Written thirty-odd years ago, in a strong, couthy Perthshire Scots, the play is a haunting account of the torments of one Robert Kirk, minister of Aberfoyle in the 1680s, whose excessive grief at the death of his young wife, Isobel, draws him into dangerous and ultimately fatal dabblings with the supernatural, and in particular with the sinister realm of ‘faery’, where he believes she is held in thrall.
Ever since Nowosielski’s young company first performed this play in 1982, it’s been graced by a central performance from Garry Stewart so full of intelligence, poignancy and integrity that it’s almost impossible not to be moved by the primal emotions it expresses. And as usual Nowosielski brings to his production a rare quality of emotional fearlessness, some stunning visual and musical imagery (original score for five musicians and ballad singer by Richard Cherns) and an inspired use of the Brunton space. The opening graveyard scene is played in the wide-open spaces of the foyer, and streams of eerily backlit fairies pour down the steep aisles of the auditorium to the rich woodland greens of the set.
Nevertheless, there’s something disturbing about this play – and indeed about the whole mystical style of Nowosielski’s season. Faced with a story like The Shepherd Beguiled, you can dismiss the whole thing as fanciful nonsense, or you can accept it as a kind of moral metaphor, or you can do as Nowosielski sometimes seems to do, and endorse it as a literal truth; in which case it ceases to be meaningful drama, and becomes a mere curiosity.
In 1987 the Scottish Theatre Company faded from the scene; but the 1980s wave of new writing and strong, inventive performance in Scottish theatre was now developing a real critical mass. It was in 1987 that Liz Lochhead, and Gerry Mulgrew’s Communicado Theatre, created Mary Queen of Scots Got Her Head Chopped Off, perhaps the finest and most thrilling Scottish-made play of the decade; in 1987 that Alan Cumming established himself as a terrific new force in Scottish acting. There was massive change afoot, too, in Glasgow, which had been named as European City of Culture for the year 1990 – one of the first cities ever to hold the title – and was beginning a long process of preparation and development, which reached a great staging post with the momentous Glasgow performances [the only ones in the UK] of Peter Brook’s Mahabharata, early in 1988. And it was perhaps a sign of changing times that Scottish-based artists were becoming ever bolder in their approach to Shakespeare, always the great measure of world theatre. 1988 saw a groundbreaking production of As You Like It by the young director Hamish Glen, which used Scots voices to give a whole new dimension to the politics of Shakespeare’s great pastoral comedy; in 1989, the great Edinburgh impresario and culture-maker Richard Demarco took audiences to the island of Inchcolm in the Firth of Forth, to witness a rainswept and completely memorable production of Macbeth.
And meanwhile, across Europe and in South Africa, we were approaching the climactic political year of the post-war era, 1989. Almost every theatre in Scotland was engaged either in presenting South African work, or in an exchange with artists from Eastern Europe, or in both. And the emerging civic politics of East European dissent was having its impact in Scotland too, where, early in 1988, all the opposition parties, and a huge range of organisations from Scottish civil society, set up a Constitutional Convention, to restart the long campaign for a Scottish Parliament, within the UK.
Hold on, there’s something strange happening here. According to Wildcat – as radical a theatre company as ever was – the present government is a callous class-based conspiracy, not only shockingly indifferent to the needs of ordinary people in areas like Scotland, but also contemptuous of the very liberal values – human rights, freedom of speech, etc. – it purports to defend. And yet this selfsame government, through the Scottish Arts Council, is paying Wildcat handsomely – over £100,000 a year – to tour throughout Scotland and elsewhere, bad-mouthing Thatcherism and all its works with scarcely a pause for breath.
If I were Wildcat, I would be beginning to wonder just why this is. It’s possible, of course, that the government isn’t quite as intolerant as they suggest; but for myself, I suspect that the powers-that-be – in deciding whether or not to exert pressure on this one – have simply come to realise how deeply ineffective this form of radical theatre is. To threaten to cut is to get into a nasty public fight; to leave it alone is to affect the political climate of Scotland scarce a whit.
There are two related reasons why Wildcat find themselves in this tame-dissident trap, and both were beautifully demonstrated by the opening of their latest show Jotters, which took place in their new home-base at Glasgow’s Jordanhill College last weekend. One is that they play largely to people who already agree with them, and their self-selected audience tends not to include people who might feel uncomfortable with a barrage of abuse directed – in this case – at every aspect of government policy on education, as well as at related targets such as the Youth Training Scheme, the Job Restart Scheme, and the deterioration of the Health Service; the performance I attended at Jordanhill, packed with students, lecturers and teachers, was like a kind of union meeting with jokes.
But the other, and more important, reason is that their theatre is not of the persuasive sort anyway. For those of us who agree with most of the points it makes, and have some experience of the education system and of unemployment, Jotters is a decent, rousing cabaret entertainment, following the grim educational and employment history of a Glasgow family called Mungo in a series of comic sketches and songs. It has its rough moments (some weak scripting, some signs of under-rehearsal, constant difficulty in hearing the words of songs over over-amplified instruments) and its gems – the Job Restart Song, the a cappella playground game, the sacking of a ‘surplus to requirements’ history teacher by a smarmy headmaster – ‘it’s all computers and hairdressing noo, you know…’; there’s fine acting from David Anderson and fine music from Steve Kettley.
But when it comes to the basic artistic business of changing people, building impossible bridges, presenting a new and original vision of the world, this show is a non-starter; to put it brutally, there was more potent, fundamental dramatic argument against the present economic dispensation in five minutes of the Citizens’ recent production of Death of a Salesman than there’s been in the last half-dozen Wildcat shows; and it’s time this talented company hired itself a decent, courageous writer, and set about confronting the basic question of why, given the obvious truth of much of what they say, the point of view they represent remains so impotent in this country.
Like the official Festival, this year’s Fringe seems to be all about Scots and Russians, with a generous sprinkling of Americans and other, more exotic visitors; the English Fringe – as represented by shows like Hull Truck’s Teechers, playing at the George Square Theatre to large crowds of off-duty educational face-workers, or by the charming It’s a Girl from the Duke’s Playhouse, Lancaster, or even by an oddly laid-back and giggly Jenny Lecoat at the Assembly Rooms – seems in strangely subdued mood. Perhaps, like the Labour Party, English alternative theatre has reached a point where it must rethink its entire politics; at any rate, these soft-centred, well-staged, witty, humanistic and utterly predictable shows look like the last gasp of a Fringe culture that’s reached the end of its line.
In Scotland, though, things seem slightly different – rougher, harsher, more colourful and cosmopolitan, shot through with a kind of brash, nothing-to-lose energy. In the official Festival, the energy blisters through the strange, heightened, ritualistically foul-mouthed new-speak of Iain Heggie’s A Wholly Healthy Glasgow, and shouts from the canvases at the Vigorous Imagination exhibition of new Scottish painting at the Modern Art Gallery. And it’s reflected with terrific, show-stopping force in Liz Lochhead’s Mary Queen of Scots Got Her Head Chopped Off, a ferociously iconoclastic re-examination of Mary Stuart’s life and its significance – in sixteenth-century Scots and standard English, fierce poetic monologue, stylised movement and sharp, almost improvised dialogue – that’s been one of the brilliant high points of this first Fringe week. Specially commissioned by the young Edinburgh-based touring company Communicado, performed at the Lyceum Studio in the very shadow of Mary’s castle, it simply blasts to smithereens the heavy, obscuring deposit of romantic claptrap that has gathered around the story down the centuries, and instead draws the most dramatic and uncomfortable parallels between the sacrifice of Mary in her day, and the myriad sexual, political and religious deformities that still plague the Scottish psyche now.
As a piece of theatre, this Mary Queen of Scots is hardly perfect yet. The fierce momentum of Mary’s rush to destruction suggests that it would play better as a ninety-minute one-acter than in two halves of a full hour each, and there are moments when it seems to spend too much time retelling Mary’s story, and not enough teasing out its meaning; in fact all its most important insights – from Mary’s suicidal rush into the arms of Bothwell, through her defeat, imprisonment, execution and enduring significance in the street culture of Scotland – are concentrated into a devastating whirlwind of a ten-minute finale, which left the first-night audience shaken, weak-kneed, and cheering themselves hoarse. But structural hiccups apart, it’s difficult to overstate the sheer theatrical invention and bravado Gerry Mulgrew and his company bring to Lochhead’s script; from the tattered purplish velvets of the set, through Anne Wood’s rich and weird continuo of scraping fiddle-music, to Myra McFadyen’s brilliant performance as the archetypal Scottish crow or corbie who narrates the piece, the whole production exudes a fierce, compelling atmosphere of its own, rich and tattered, shabby and sharp, bloody and yet unrepentant, like the history of Scotland itself, or, for that matter, of womankind. In this production, Liz Lochhead’s terrific dramatic gifts of richness of language and strength of characterisation find the theatrical home they’ve been waiting for in the physicality, the visual imagination, the sheer showmanship of Mulgrew’s theatre. Even more importantly, the combination has produced, for Scotland, a play that blasts Mary’s myths, not out of mindless radicalism, but because it has something more important to say about her and about us, about womanhood, about the nation.
It’s interesting to see Tom Stoppard’s Travesties come perilously close to falling flat on its face, in this new production at Dundee Rep; the atmosphere in the auditorium wavers, throughout, between exasperation, alienation, and outright boredom. Yet this lack of sympathy between stage and audience has very very little to do with any shortcomings in the production, and nothing at all to do with the efforts of Robert Robertson’s delightful young company, who throw themselves into Stoppard’s glittering tangle of political and philosophical wit with enough verve, energy, intelligence and determination to stop a juggernaut, and win themselves a warm final ovation in the process.
Robert Robertson’s idea of pairing productions of Travesties and The Importance of Being Earnest – using the same cast and set – works startlingly well and very amusingly in exposing the structural links between the plays; and the company that plodded smartly but aimlessly through Importance seems to have been goaded by the sheer difficulty and structural ingenuity of Stoppard’s text on to a different level of achievement, working flat-out to make his dense rhetorical variations on the idea of revolution and the artist, his clever treatment of the characters and ideas of James Joyce, of Lenin, of Tzara, and of all the intellectual glitterati that converged on Zurich during the First World War, seem interesting and significant to the audience. Peter Forbes’s Joyce is brilliant, self-absorbed, superbly Irish, beautifully in tune with Stoppard’s satirical use of language and its rhythms; Bridget McCann – faced with the most difficult speech in the play, a ten-minute lecture on the history of Marxism – produces an impressively passionate performance as the Bolshevik librarian, Cecily, buoyed up by the audience’s obvious sympathy with her contempt for the politically illiterate Englishman Henry Carr; and the rest of the cast enter into the spirit of the thing with discipline and panache.
The problem is simply that 400 miles north of Oxford and Hampstead – and twenty years on from the age when this critical approach to the sacred cows of revolution would have seemed brilliant and refreshing – the youthful Stoppard’s glittering verbal games with the big ideas of the century seem both fundamentally undramatic in conception (hence the boredom) and dangerously quietist in political approach (hence the alienation). This is a play which dismisses Marxism/Leninism as an unpleasant joke, roundly endorses the bourgeois individualist idea of the artist, implicitly advocates a sceptical and reactionary attitude to radical politics, and expects its audience to listen with admiration to ten-minute exhibitions of showy undergraduate wit; small wonder that it cuts no ice in a city like Dundee, which has to live with the human consequences of the smart and cynical New Rightism of which Stoppard, whether he likes it or not, has become a chief scribe. The play contains one decent argument against dialectical materialism, in which Carr says he won’t be told that he ended up in the trenches ‘because there was a profit in ball-bearings’. But for the most part, the Stoppard of Travesties is too much parti pris: he allows what should be a passionate debate about how to organise a just society without sacrificing essential freedoms to degenerate into a clever joke at the expense of one side of the argument, and there are places in Britain where that kind of flippancy is hard to admire, and harder to forgive.
When Peter Hall first saw the text of Harold Pinter’s No Man’s Land – a few months before his premiere production of it in London in 1975 – he felt, so his diaries tell us, that the play was about ‘the real artist harassed by the phoney artist’; as if its central confrontation – between the wealthy middle-aged writer Hirst, and the crumpled, self-aggrandising literary voyeur Spooner, whom he meets on Hampstead Heath and brings home for a drink – were a one-sided affair, with all the virtue, charm and authority resting on Hirst’s side. It’s perhaps not surprising that this powerful new production at the Citizens’ Theatre – featuring Robert David MacDonald as Hirst and Giles Havergal as Spooner – takes a more complex and ambivalent view of Hirst and his worldly success. Peter Hall himself eventually came to feel that the play was about ‘opposites – genius against lack of talent, success against failure, drink against sobriety…’; MacDonald and Havergal – with the kind of quiet political rigour that’s become a hallmark of their recent work – take the interpretation a stage further, and present the play as a powerful, well-focused reflection on the relationship between haves and have-nots in English society, and on the comical way in which the bland bonhomie of middle-class English discourse – with its pattern of real or imagined contacts at school and Oxford, in the War or in London clubs – can temporarily soften, confuse and conceal irreconcilable differences of status and interest.
The result is a completely fascinating performance, funny, poignant, ultimately sinister and slightly tragic, and full of complex shifts of sympathy between the two characters. If Havergal’s poverty-stricken Spooner is bumptious, obsequious, grubby, irritating, and full of the literary equivalent of Walter Mitty fantasies, MacDonald’s Hirst is in a complete and dangerous emotional wasteland, literally paralytic with drink, isolated and imprisoned by his wealth, and by the two thuggish hangers-on (Foster and Briggs, played with exaggerated Orton-esque panache by Jonathan Phillips and Patrick Hannaway) it has bought him.
What MacDonald and Havergal give us, in the end, is a meticulous and deeply felt portrait of two men – perhaps even potential friends – whose capacity for real, truthful, affectionate relationships has been damaged beyond repair by the operation of money, or the lack of it, on their lives. Spooner retains the ability to talk, but has lost useful contact with reality; Hirst sees the truth, but cannot break out of his prison to communicate. The language patterns that form a fragile bond between them act – as everywhere in Pinter – like a barrier against reality, an expression of an older and defunct order of things; the little fluttering hand gestures with which the men occasionally reach out to one another are poignant and futile, in the face of the ruthless realism of Foster and Briggs. And in the play’s final moments, with Spooner walking away across a darkening stage, and the two heavies standing shoulder to shoulder behind Hirst’s chair like guards or warders, I had the most powerful, sudden vision of something lying between them, bleeding messily into the tasteful carpeting of Kathy Strachan’s clever, understated set – something like love, or aborted hope, or perhaps an old idea of society as something more than a cold human jungle, where Spooner’s poverty is the ultimate unforgivable crime, and success is only bearable if, like Hirst, you keep topping up the drinks, and changing the subject.
You would think the Scots language movement might have learned something from the failed Scottish Renaissance of the 1940s, when some of the most talented and fluent Scots-language writers of the century wasted their time concocting mock-medieval Borders comedies that created a deadly, foosty image of the whole idea of Scots language for a generation of schoolchildren. But like many groups marginalised from the mainstream of history, Scots seem doomed to repeat ad infinitum the same cycle of dawning cultural awareness followed by failure and forgetting. David Purves is one of the most effective manipulators and synthesisers of Scots writing today; his language is tough, eclectic, demotic yet scholarly, and a joy to hear. Yet in his new play The Knicht o the Riddils – premiered this week at the Brunton Theatre in Musselburgh – he chooses, inexplicably, to squander his skills on a daft medieval fairy story of scant significance, and only intermittent charm.
In itself, The Knicht o the Riddils is an attractive enough entertainment, a bold, raunchy, neatly crafted tale about a young Prince of Scotland called Cormac: threatened with poisoning by his ill-tempered stepmother Sheena, he sets off with his loyal stepbrother Alistair – who has no time for his scheming mamma – to the far country of Galloway, to seek the hand of the fair daughter of the Knicht o the Riddils, a gnome-like old curmudgeon who will only give poor Una in marriage to someone who can baffle him with a riddle. Nick Sargent’s set and costumes make a gorgeous, fluent, witty pattern of soft storybook colours; many of the performances – particularly Anne Lacey’s inimitably graceless Queen Sheena – are delightful; Charles Nowosielski’s production moves along with an easy, faultless narrative pace, and his determination to show new Scottish work to his Musselburgh audience is in every way admirable.
But in the end, it’s simply a shame to see so much craftsmanship and commitment wasted on an old joke of a story that has no chance of really moving or involving a contemporary audience. Two years ago, Purves wrote a Christmas show for the Traverse based on the story of the princess and the frog; then, the vigour of his language and the robust charm of the old Scottish folktale told for children were impressive enough in themselves. But unless Scots can move on from this medieval dream, and begin to assert itself as a medium capable of carrying serious adult drama about recognisable problems and tensions, the language is a lost cause; and Purves’s work will be consigned to that dustbin of cultural history where most twentieth-century Scots-language writing now languishes – completely unmourned, it should be said, by the vast majority of ordinary Scots, who already experience their cultural disinheritance as little more than a dull ache, and spend their time, like everyone else, watching drama like EastEnders and Neighbours, which has something to say about the way we all live now.
It is night in Kelvinside, a posh part of Glasgow. Up in the nursery – in the dim blue glow of the TV screen – the little dressing-gowned figures of Victor (Forbes Masson, in pink) and Barry (Alan Cumming, in blue) are to be seen grooving and cooing on their bunks to the strains of a video of South Pacific, bought that day – along with lots of other Christmas goodies – with the purloined Access card of their daddy, a mad scientist with severe financial problems and, following a recent domestic dispute, no wife. Suddenly, the enraged papa bursts in, and not only smashes the precious video to smithereens (‘But South Pacific is our raison d’être!’ wail the twins), but also threatens to chuck out of the house forthwith the Babes’ feathered friend Shug, a broken-winged seagull rescued from the lee of the Kibble Palace, Glasgow’s famous tropical palm house. The Babes decide to run away into the wilds of the Botanical Gardens, and thus – give or take a hysterical scene or three – begins the big adventure of the Tron’s brilliant, naughty, clever and hilarious pantomime for adults, written by the amazing Victor and Barry, enfants terribles of the Scottish comedy scene, and very little the worse for that.
There’s no point in denying, of course, that wicked send-up pantomimes like this have their problems. For a start, there’s the acute moral confusion and tasteless cynicism of it all; in a situation where you’re constantly invited to be sceptical about the manners and morals of the heroes, happy endings looks like black farce and plots tend to disintegrate – this one nearly founders completely on a human-sized reincarnation of the seagull, not to mention a nasty militaristic collie dog who’s supposed to be a goodie. As for the villains, headed in this case by a crazed geneticist called Dr Vivien Section (‘My friends call me Vivi…’) who wants to take over the world from a bunker beneath the Botanics, they hardly know what tone to take.
But the characters Victor and Barry have created for themselves in this show – a pair of self-righteous, ecologically minded, middle-class brats, much given to whining about their ‘financially insecure background’ and the difficulty of getting vegetarian wholefood at school dinners – are just so funny, so well-observed, so brilliantly conceived as a vehicle for satire against the vaguely suspect wishy-washy ‘green’ politics of the middle-class left in the 1980s (and Glasgow is full, these days, of nice left-wing people with nice big elegant flats), that they carry the whole show effortlessly before them. This is simply the slickest, strongest, best-rehearsed and best-scripted double act on the Scottish pantomime circuit, and its originality and professionalism put many more experienced performers to shame. What’s more, it’s backed by decent, generous supporting performances from Sandy Neilson as the daddy/villain and Finlay Welsh as the Babes’ nanny, a raddled, randy-looking peroxide-blonde Dame; and it’s smoothly and humorously directed by Hamish Glen, who somehow manages to manoeuvre his little company successfully through the ethical, musical and dramatic minefields created by Victor and Barry’s unstoppably satirical attitude to everything from walking trees to magic pills (‘D’you think that’s a drug, Barry? Well just say no…’) – and that despite some pretty feeble acting further down the cast. So if I were you I would rush to the Tron before tickets sell out completely, and prepare myself to laugh at Vic and Baz until my guts ached; but for heaven’s sake, unless you want their infant idealism curdled at birth, leave the kids at home!
Whatever else he was, Noël Coward was not a conventional thinker. He certainly went in for lavish public endorsements of patriotism, tradition, and sentimental nationalism, as the programme note to this fascinating Citizens’ Company revival of The Vortex points out. But when it comes to the real stuff of his plays – which are about the conduct of private life in a highly wrought, over-privileged civilisation – he achieves, at his best, a subtle and completely original moral perspective; indeed it’s hard not to see something downright revolutionary in the value system of later masterpieces like Private Lives, where the attitude taken by Elyot and Amanda – vain, irresponsible, hopelessly aesthetic, reckless in love, bright and defiant in the face of mortality – is seen as a braver, richer and ultimately wiser response to the transience of human existence than the suburban common-sense of rejected spouses Victor and Sybil.
Which is why it is strange, in The Vortex, to see the youthful Coward (he was twenty-five in 1924) struggling with a melodramatic style of theatre that demands big gestures, unselfconscious emotion, and, above all, moral simplicity. The play begins confidently enough, with a barrage of conversation as jaggedly sophisticated as even Coward could wish. The scene is the London salon of the heroine Flo Lancaster, where the relentlessly beautiful Flo – her assurance fraying ever so slightly as she approaches her mid-forties – is carrying on as usual with a young Guards officer; and from the moment Maria Aitken sails on to the stage, all brittle defiance and little veiled hats, it becomes apparent that she is offering a comic Coward performance of the very finest quality, full of that lightweight, perfectly timed theatricality that works like a dream in the theatre, but also reflects the reality of the character’s social performance, so that even as you laugh you can’t help being aware of the frightened, ageing female animal behind the smart public persona.
The trouble with The Vortex, though, is that its melodramatic format demands that Coward become heavy-handed with his heroine; it doesn’t allow the quiet, tragicomic crumbling of her illusions that Coward might have achieved later in his career. Into the equation stalks Flo’s embarrassingly grownup son, Nicholas, played by Rupert Everett in a strange, twitchy, naturalistic style that’s powerful and compelling in itself, but somehow irrelevant both to the play’s comedy and to its melodrama. Neurotic, mother-fixated, edgy from snuffing cocaine and tenuously engaged to a sensible type called Bunty, Nicholas propels his mother through a fragmented house-party weekend to a nasty Hamlet-style boudoir confrontation in which he accuses her (oh horror) of having lovers; and it’s at this point that Philip Prowse’s elegant and deeply amusing production begins to come apart at the seams, Everett seeming to find the whole scenario faintly embarrassing, and Aitken unsure whether to play the scene as just another of Flo’s social performances, or to let the real woman come screaming through.
In the end, though, these problems lie at least as much in the play as in the production. It’s hardly surprising, given his later record, that Coward found it hard to put much conviction into the fretful Nicky’s reactionary demands that Flo stop having lovers and start being a ‘proper mother’; the true moral centre of the play lies not with him, but with the more subtle understanding of Flo’s wise friend Helen, deftly played by Anne Lambton, and it’s perhaps a mark of inexperience that Coward brings the final curtain down without allowing this key figure her final say. Within the limitations of this brave and brittle play, though, Prowse’s company create a fascinating, funny and humane piece of theatre, set (by Prowse himself) in a rich black-and-cream dream of 1930s avant-garde decor that carries heavy modern resonances, full of fine supporting performances, and strong enough to cast a powerful, penetrating light on the serious preoccupation with social ‘decadence’ that went on to underpin Coward’s most famous comedies. If the Citizens’ go on like this, we shall have to forget the ‘talent to amuse’ stuff altogether, and begin to recognise Noël Coward as one of the most subtle and significant playwrights of the century; I wonder what the Master would have said to that.
Last week, a few days before the Glasgow opening of Peter Brook’s mighty Mahabharata, I asked Neil Wallace – Deputy Director of the City’s newly formed Festivals Unit, and the ‘man with a mission’ who has fought and schemed and negotiated tirelessly for almost a year to bring Brook and his company to Glasgow – what it was about this piece of work that he admired, revered, wanted so much. He thought, paused, shook his head. ‘I just can’t say,’ he said. ‘I can’t disentangle my feelings about the show as a piece of theatre from my feelings about what it represents…’
He was right, and perhaps in more ways than he intended. This event, the Mahabharata in Glasgow, is something that simply overflows the bounds of normal theatrical experience. For Glasgow, it represents a magnificent turning point, a key moment in the city’s re-emergence from decades of industrial decline to take its place again as one of the great second cities of the world, vigorous, cosmopolitan, handsome even in dilapidation, fizzing with creative energy and civic pride and – most important of all – living proof that the spirit of a city can survive the worst ravages and humiliations of the post-industrial age. To anyone who has watched Glasgow pull itself up by its creative bootstraps these last half-dozen years, and seen the emergence of the unique powerful consensus about the value of the arts in the city’s life which makes possible the raising of £350,000 to stage something like the Mahabharata, the sheer presence in Glasgow of this most glamorous and remarkable show of the decade is a moving testament to the city’s resilience. From the City Council and Strathclyde Region, from the business community, from the public who have already bought almost all the available £140,000-worth of Mahabharata tickets, and even from the proverbial man in the street – who seems to feel, without resentment and with pride, that all of this is ‘great for Glasgow’ – there is what Wallace calls a ‘quite remarkable degree of unanimity’ that the development of the arts represents a prime investment in the city’s future, and, what’s more, that Glasgow’s artistic life, to develop its full potential, must and should get into dialogue with the richest, most exciting and most subtle work that world theatre has to offer.
And that Peter Brook’s Mahabharata represents that scale and quality of artistic experience is beyond doubt; indeed it’s perhaps the greatest tribute of all to Brook’s achievement as a director that the meaning of this work – even without its extraordinary Glasgow dimension – seems to go so far beyond theatre itself. What Brook is doing, in the Mahabharata, is taking what is possibly the greatest, wisest and most powerful story ever written – a vast epic of war and peace in India two thousand years ago, fifteen times as long as the Bible, and so subtle and humorous in its perspective that it makes our own great religious epic look like a slim, grim patriarchal episode in a vastly more beautiful and many-layered story – and making it accessible, with courage, with artistry, and with an immense effort of compression, to Western audiences that come to it almost hungrily, so deeply do they seem to need its wisdom and its grace.
At the beginning of the Mahabharata, a storyteller called Vyasa appears, together with a little boy. He says he is going to tell the story of the boy’s ancestors, which is also ‘the poetical history of mankind’; they are joined by Ganesha, a god with an elephant’s head, who acts as scribe, and Vyasa proceeds to tell – or perhaps to create – the story of a terrible conflict between two families of cousins, the Pandavas – five fine brothers all married to the same woman, the lovely Draupadi – and the hundred Kauravas, a race of violent, angry malcontents led by the fierce warrior Duryodhana. The story is comic, tragic, magical, erotic, sometimes spectacular, and it ranges through many moods, from a kind of cool, humorous Brechtian distance in telling the story through the commentary of Vyasa and Ganesha, to the most powerful and direct dramatic action, particularly in the third and final play, The War, which tells the story of the earth-shaking battle that finally brought the conflict between the cousins to an end, leaving ‘eighteen million dead’. This war is given an extra dimension of dread – and a spine-chilling significance for modern audiences – by the existence of a terrible weapon of extermination, which will end the war only by destroying the whole earth; and our intense empathy with the fear of this weapon – the despairing silence in which we finally watch it unleashed – gives a terrific emphasis to the Mahabharata’s preoccupation with the source of evil and violence in the world, with questions of how far ends justify means in fighting evil, in the problem of whether passive non-violence or active resistance represents the best response. The poem is also preoccupied with ideas about parenthood and family, about the mysterious, god-given origins of the human being, about the evil that results ‘when one prefers one’s own children to the children of others’. It asks, again and again, about the meaning of death, whether it is important, whether it is real; and there is a kind of continuous subplot to do with the poet Vyasa, with his role, his moral responsibility, the limits of his power to create the story.
Brook’s thirty-strong company of actors and musicians – on their great clay floor at the Old Transport Museum in Pollokshaws, flanked by pools of water and backed by raw brick walls – present all this rich multiplicity of experience with force, with humanity, with a kind of self-conscious simplicity of staging that very rarely tips over into coyness; the look of the production – in earth colours of cream, ochre, deep reds – is often quite stunning, reflecting the basic elements of earth, fire, water that leap and shimmer everywhere in the playing area. It would be wrong to give the impression that this Mahabharata represents some kind of continuous triumph of unique theatrical brilliance; it is a very human show, and it has its failings. I can imagine adaptations of the text that might be more ruthless and coherent in finding a single dramatic ‘through line’ for the play; I can imagine productions that would force a more unified acting style, and achieve a stronger immediate impact. The acting – and particularly the handling of language – is variable in quality; the balance between lightness and serious drama sometimes slips a little too far in the direction of showmanship, just as the production sometimes looks a little over-elaborate, overdressed and over-lit for its ostensibly simple style. The Glasgow audience listened rapt to the deep, reflective moments of the text, but sometimes seemed exasperated by the noisier and more spectacular aspects. As for the space, the Mahabharata has to fight every inch of the way against the great, powerful girders of the Transport Museum for the gentle freedom, the room to breathe and grow organically without too much obvious structure, that it enjoyed in the quarries and outdoor spaces where it was born; Glasgow’s great new space – and let’s hope it becomes a permanent one – seems to demand something more rigid, more real.
But in the end, Brook’s great achievement with the Mahabharata lies precisely in the self-control with which he and his adaptor Jean-Claude Carrière have shaped it, remade it, presented it, without trying to simplify it, or to impose Western ideas of consistency and coherence on it; they lay it before us in all its rich ambiguity and contradiction, and they do not apologise. What is more, they allow the actors of the company to find their own way – with an extraordinary freedom and integrity – towards the dramatic force of the text, not distorting their own personalities but using them, so that the multiplicity of the text produces a whole world of acting styles, from the fine Shakespearean heroism of Jeffery Kissoon as Karma – the warrior abandoned as a child, doomed to fight for ever against his unknown brothers, the Pandavas – through the fine, filmic naturalism of Andrzej Seweryn as the good king Yudhishthira, the eldest Pandava, to the folksy comedy and melodrama of Miriam Goldschmidt (Kunti) and Tuncel Kurtiz (Shakuri), and the wonderful, Brechtian coolness, mischief and compassion of Bruce Myers as the man-god Krishna, the performance that epitomises the spirit of the whole piece.
A dozen years ago, enchanted by the Mahabharata stories they had learned, Brook and Jean-Claude Carrière made a vow, one night in Paris, that they ‘would find a way of bringing this material into our world and sharing these stories with an audience in the west.’ They have kept their promise, just as the story itself keeps its promise, made in the first moments, that ‘when you have heard it, you will be someone else.’ So that what is most important about this show is not its inventiveness or its skill, not its beauty, not the quality of the acting and the adaptation, all of which are open to discussion. It is just the fact that it brings back to us – with integrity, with humility, with respect for the strange, unfathomable dharma, the underlying order of the piece itself – a priceless and beautiful work of the human imagination that we had lost, and needed to find again.
TAG (Theatre About Glasgow) is a small, unassuming theatre company, a theatre-in-education group with a strong commitment to touring in schools, to accessible classics, and to new writing on themes that affect Scottish kids now; even in its native city, it’s not the kind of company that gets invited to provide big, centrepiece productions for international festivals. And yet it seems to me that TAG’s new version of Great Expectations – which played to capacity audiences at the Chandler Studio last week before an extensive tour – is the most rounded, satisfying and successful piece of home-grown Scottish theatre this Mayfest has produced so far. Like the great Mahabharata, thundering its way through the final performance at the Old Transport Museum as I write, this deft, tender and intermittently brilliant treatment of Dickens’s novel uses a strong and sophisticated range of live-theatre techniques to achieve a relatively simple result – the effective theatrical retelling of a great and gripping story, backed by a passionate feeling for the pity and complexity of human experience.
In technical terms, what this Great Expectations does is to pull off, with almost complete success, the kind of combination of dance and drama that many Scottish companies have been striving for this season. Working in close collaboration with writer John Clifford and choreographer Gregory Nash, TAG’s director Ian Brown has succeeded in building a company of actors who can move and dance, dancers who can speak and act; and the cross-fertilisation of the two disciplines – helped by Peter Salem’s wonderful, jarring live music for keyboard and cello, and most significantly by John Clifford’s script, a miracle of intelligent compression that wraps itself elegantly around every essential element of the story in the course of a short evening – has produced a rich, seamless sequence of talk and movement that might have been created to bring to life the peculiar world of caricature and half-nightmare in which Dickens’s characters move. At any moment, a prose conversation can surge into a pattern of stylised movement, the characters’ lives dissolve into a pattern beyond their control; and in that sense the technique serves as a superb metaphor for the impact of ruthless social forces on individual lives which is one of Dickens’s great themes.
Of course, not every writer would yield so successfully to this approach, and not every element of Dickens’s story responds to it so well as, say, the surreal scenes in Jaggers’s office, or the ball at Richmond where Estella evades Pip. Some of the solo dance sequences seem too long, out of sympathy with the rapid, elliptical rhythm of the text. The opening needs more verbal explanation for those unfamiliar with the story; and towards the end, we need more stillness to let strongly written dialogue speak for itself.
But overall, the technique is stunningly successful; so much so that the production moves easily beyond questions of method, to convince us anew of the terrific relevance and force of Dickens’s vision, and to reaffirm his sense of despair (for the original ending of the book was a very bleak one) at the cancer of class- and money-consciousness that blights the social and erotic imagination of his England, and – at an even deeper level – at the tragic way in which that blight of inherited wealth and inherited misery is passed on from generation to generation, touching the expectations of children like Pip and Estella with a dark, inexplicable frost. Among a clutch of fine performances, Alan Cumming is superb as a vain, enthusiastic, vulnerable and ultimately disillusioned Pip, Alistair Galbraith is touchingly strong and clumsy as Joe Gargery the blacksmith, and Forbes Masson magnificently rigid as Jaggers the lawyer. But in the end this is ensemble work of the best kind; and for sheer creative originality matched with true feeling, a passion to communicate, and a decent economy of means, it deserves the biggest red rose in Mayfest’s bouquet.
It was a few years ago that I first heard the phrase ‘the fourth world’; it was bandied about a bit in left-wing circles, and then seemed to slip out of fashion. But the phenomenon it describes has not gone away. It refers to the powerless of the earth wherever they are, to the Third World poor grubbing a living off rubbish dumps in Cairo and Manila, to depressed young mums hanging on on Social Security in Newcastle tower blocks, to people everywhere who work long hours in low-paid jobs because the alternative is no work at all; and it refers to the young unemployed, that unhappy generation born in the 1960s who grew up, all across the developed world, to find the idea of a job-for-life evaporating before their eyes.
What the German writer-director Manfred Karge has done in The Conquest of the South Pole – first seen in Germany last year, and now given its British premiere at the Traverse Theatre – is to write a play for and about that fourth world: sharp, funny, tough, searching, and unsentimental, as oblique and fast-moving as a slick video in its range of cultural references, it seems to grasp the whole meaning of that problem of human powerlessness in one rigorous, compassionate political intelligence. It’s a play that smells of the future, of new problems, new perceptions, new forms of storytelling, new approaches to language; but its triumph is to be completely new and original, without ever seeming merely bizarre or ‘experimental’. The audience responds not with puzzlement, but with gasps of recognition and laughter, as though they had been waiting for just this postmodern combination of the pitiless and the compassionate, the fantastical and the rigorously true; and in Steve Unwin’s brilliant production at the Traverse – fierce, vivid, angry and tender by turns, combining real political and emotional subtlety with a terrific voltage of theatrical energy – it emerges as one of the most exhilarating theatre experiences of a demoralised decade, finding the energy to move us on at last into the 1990s, not by turning its back on the pain and anger of the ’80s, but by using it and moving beyond it.
Set in some bleak German backwater called Herne, the play begins when four unemployed youths – Slupianek, Buescher, Braukmann and Seifert – find one of their number trying to commit suicide by hanging himself. In a last-ditch effort to fight off terminal apathy, they begin a kind of desperate game, in which – up in Braukmann’s attic – they act out the story of Amundsen’s successful 1911 expedition to the South Pole. In thirteen short, intensely written and often very funny scenes, the play tells the story of their journey, how they assemble the equipment they need, how they meet the threats to their solidarity posed by the depression and apathy of Buescher and by the sudden good fortune of Braukmann, who unexpectedly finds a job; of how their resolve is strengthened, at a crucial moment, by an encounter with the bourgeoisie at its most crass and charmless; of how Braukmann’s down-to-earth wife Louise, pregnant, exhausted by her job in a chip shop, and concerned about the security of her child’s future, nonetheless feels compelled to join them in the end; and of how they make it through the last 179 kilometres, from the point where Shackleton gave up to the point where Amundsen succeeded.
The language – cleverly translated into English by Anthony Vivis, but performed with a strong Scottish accent that brings out its toughness and ironic force – is earthy and yet theatrical, touched with a dense, modern poetic strangeness, like a cross between Brecht, Steven Berkoff, and the Anthony Burgess of Clockwork Orange; the play itself strikes a most delicate balance between sheer absurdity and real human struggle. But all of this – the harshness and fantasy of the tone, the underlying political anger, the wild streak in the language – seems to come absolutely naturally to Unwin and his brilliantly chosen young company of Scottish actors, who seem to know more than enough about the experience of unemployment and alienation, and who move as one around the stage, ferociously committed and unified, beautifully choreographed to a backing of wild rock music, and led by Alan Cumming (as the ringleader Slupianek) and Carol Ann Crawford (as Louise) in a pair of performances so funny, so intelligent, and so at one with Karge’s language, that they had the audience bursting into exuberant little spurts of applause between scenes.
What the play amounts to, in the end, is a fierce reassertion of the right of dispossessed people to take charge of their own inner world, as a first step to regaining some control of the outer one; of their right to imagine, to dream, to create and procreate, to define their own goals, not to be browbeaten into accepting lousy jobs and lousy definitions of themselves in order to survive. It also – and this is perhaps why it makes such exhilarating theatre – reaffirms the power of the imagination, of play-acting itself, to smash through the barriers erected by harsh economic realities, to draw people into the experience of those whose misery they do not share, and to allow those who are in despair access to the strength and confidence of the powerful and fortunate. And finally, it asserts something else: that it’s from those dispossessed people, those who really need the power of imagination to transform and restore their lives, that theatre draws its best strength. Without them, and without writers like Karge who care for their experience and want to draw it into the circle of human understanding, theatre itself becomes weak; drained of the guts, the significance, the passion and the real human excitement that should, if there is any justice at all, make this Conquest of the South Pole one of the hottest tickets of the year, at the Edinburgh Festival, and beyond.
If there were any justice – and there isn’t – then Hamish Glen’s new production of As You Like It at the Royal Lyceum in Edinburgh would be enjoying the same kind of public attention and controversy as Simon Callow’s Glaswegian version of Die Fledermaus, and for the same good reason: because it tries so strongly, so earnestly, and with such commitment – although with some undeniable cost to the original work – to make the piece matter in the context of Scotland now. The Callow Fledermaus looks from a slightly metropolitan angle at the revamping of Glasgow as a smart and trendy culture city; Glen’s As You Like It throws itself headlong into a much older and wider question of Scottish identity and politics, exploiting the basic tension of Shakespeare’s plot – between the corrupt, usurping and authoritarian ‘new duke’ in the city, and the wise, generous ‘old duke’ exiled in the forest – to explore ideas and myths about a Scottish vision of Arden, the kind of once-and-future ‘free Scotland’ that could just still exist, beyond the shifty anglicised façade of Scottish public life today.
What Glen and his designer Peter Ling have done is to weave a pattern of powerfully contrasting images around the two settings of the play, at the court of the ‘new duke’, and in Arden. The first forty minutes – the scenes at court – are placed deliberately on the forestage of the theatre, in front of the Royal Lyceum’s rich red-plush-and-gilt curtain, with the imperial crown above the proscenium picked out in spotlight, and with the courtiers gathering in the rococo blue-plaster boxes nearest the stage to mock at young Orlando as he challenges the duke’s wrestler; in other words, with great wit and justice, Glen and Ling make the Lyceum itself play the role of the anglicised, city, establishment place where all the characters – except old Adam the servant – speak in rigorous BBC English, or in ugly attempts at it.
These scenes are divided from the rest of the play by Rosalind’s epilogue, given here as a prologue, as if it marked the beginning of the true action; then the curtain hurtles up on something like Macbeth’s blasted heath, a wild, cold, stony, bleak, but truthful place, a kind of mythical Rob Roy country of the Scottish soul, where the music is pipes and drums and wild recorded folk-rock, where Celtic symbols of sun and moon glow over the landscape, ancient standing stones loom protectively around the stage, all the characters speak in variants of Scots, and – this is where Glen’s vision meshes with Shakespeare’s – these men returned to honest poverty need at last ‘fear nae enemy but winter, and rough weather.’ It’s not Arden as we generally think of it, that twittering English greenwood inhabited by pert RADA actresses with nice accents. But I suspect it has at least as much in common with Shakespeare’s forest of harsh winter winds; and although there are those who find the sound of Shakespeare spoken in Scots self-evidently absurd, in fact it’s quite obvious from the easy survival of his verse-rhythms, rhymes and assonances that the sound of Shakespearean English must have been as close to traditional Scots as to modern received pronunciation.
Of course, this bold attempt to wrest Shakespeare’s most lovely and joyful marriage-comedy into the world of Scottish cultural politics comes to grief in the end, for all sorts of reasons. For one, Glen has not been able to push his analysis through into the personal and erotic implications of the cultural situation he pinpoints (although these certainly exist), and therefore hasn’t achieved any fresh understanding of the play’s dominant theme, which is heterosexual love in its most poignant springtime freshness; as a result, the production loses energy catastrophically in the long love scenes of the second half. But mainly it fails because it asks a little too much of Glen’s company, some of whom are inexperienced in large-scale theatre, and all of whom are virtually having to translate Shakespeare into Scots as they go along. They find it easy to use their native speech for the humour and gruffness and pithiness that are its stereotyped qualities, less easy to give it its full range of beauty and lyricism; and some of the verse-speaking is therefore poor, rough and throwaway, to an extent that’s likely to offend some of those who cherish the sound of the words.
But despite the desperate and sometimes ruinous cultural risks it takes – Sean Scanlan playing Jaques as a kind of cross between Nicholas Fairbairn and Oscar Wilde, miles over the top and yet strangely memorable – the production throws up a whole clutch of brave, convinced and convincing performances, from Paul Samson’s quite excellent Orlando, through Siobhan Redmond’s blithe and intelligent Rosalind, to Sandy Neilson’s cleverly spoken account of the two dukes, keystones of the contrasting linguistic and cultural dispensations. No one could call this a wholly successful As You Like It: it takes huge chances, it falls flat on its face, it rides roughshod over one of the most sacred combes of English literature, and perhaps only a Scot could love it. But even at its worst, it’s a dauntless, passionate and creative effort to put the modern Scottish soul back in touch with a great, exuberant play about power, and love, and the whole damn thing; and I think it deserves an audience.
It’s a paradox about our on-yer-bike society that the only relationships it really recognises – the rigid nuclear-family ones of husband to wife and young children to parents – are becoming increasingly rare. On one hand, every social-trends survey that’s published shows a growing number of single-person households and single-parent families. On the other, the economic imperatives of the day – the demand for a perfectly mobile, flexible labour force – seem to class as dispensible all the relationships that make such a single life tolerable: by and large, ‘sensible’ people don’t turn down jobs 400 miles away, or the chance of better housing in a different area, just because their old mum likes to have them nearby, or because a beloved brother or sister or niece or friend or auntie lives in the next street. Small wonder that our society is riddled with loneliness, with people whose lives have been made emotionally barren because the emotional contacts that meant most to them had no official status, and were shattered before anyone could articulate their importance.
It’s this cultural catch-22, and the personal tragedy it implies, that seems to lie behind Gordon Burnside’s first stage play A Man at Yir Back, which opens the spring season at Dundee Rep. The title refers to the notion that life is better for a woman if she has a man behind her, a husband to support her; the play, a piece of unabashedly popular drama packed with references to local Dundee history, with old Dundee songs and old-fashioned Dundee talk, faces the melancholy fact that for generations of women in a town where the industries mainly employed female labour, a good man with a good pay packet has nonetheless been hard to find – and that now, with the old supportive communities scattered to the winds, a happy marriage is rarer and more desirable than ever.
The centrepiece of the play is an encounter between the indomitable Dolly – a poverty-stricken but feisty Dundee pensioner with a foul mouth, a wicked wit, and the proverbial heart of gold, desperately clinging to the shadow of her happy marriage to Tommy – and her social worker, a sweet middle-class girl called Dorothy who has just been given the elbow by her married lover. Both women are more frightened than they dare admit by the prospect of a lonely life (‘Oh dear me, what will I do, if I die an old maid in a garret?’ keens a passing neighbour, from a famous Dundee folk song), and yet neither seems able to recognise and defend the other aspects of her life that would compensate for the absence of a man. Dolly’s only daughter – herself a single parent – is about to take up a job in Bristol, a fact which Dolly accepts without protest; her widowed neighbour Mina, her only regular visitor apart from the postman, is about to move into sheltered housing several miles away, apparently unaware – like Dolly herself – of the pain the separation will involve.
Burnside’s play is not a complex, highly wrought piece of drama, and it often seems to come across these big themes by accident, rather than thinking them through, and building itself around them. The style is naturalistic and observational, decorated only by the occasional over-elaborate fugue of Dundee history and patter. Given this oblique, gentle approach to the play’s central concerns, it’s perhaps not surprising that its structure is a shade problematic, with the second act drifting too quietly towards an abrupt crisis, or that the character of Dolly is seriously underwritten; Burnside clearly prefers creating pithy patter for Dolly and Mina, and he indulges that preference too much.
But a writer who observes clearly, strongly and passionately enough to touch such a deep nerve of pain in our common experience with so little artifice clearly has a tremendous dramatic gift, and one worth developing. For my taste, A Man at Yir Back is a little too long and a little too couthy, its Dundee character sometimes laid on superficially with a trowel, rather than allowed to speak for itself, in the way that reaches universal truths through unadorned local ones. But with the help of Irene Sunters’ magnificent bravura performance as Dolly – brave as a lion in the face of the old familiar horrors of life, but frightened in the face of new ones she can hardly name – and of Monika Nisbet’s acutely observed domestic set, not comfortless but somehow bleak, the play emerges as a moving and quietly disturbing experience; a love story, a tribute to an old working-class city that no longer quite exists, but also a sad reflection on a money-grubbing, emotionally illiterate society, that has barely begun to understand the subtle damage it inflicts on itself, and whose fundamental heartlessness the battered mechanisms of the welfare state can hardly conceal.
It’s one of the myths of our civilisation that, whereas middle-class culture is international and universal, working-class culture is somehow local and parochial, a matter of ‘Cockney slang’ or ‘Glasgow humour’. It’s a comforting idea, in that it reduces the common experience of the millions of human beings who were drawn into the cities in the industrial age – their courage, their humour, their resilience in the face of unrelenting poverty and drastic overcrowding – to a matter of ‘local character’; it makes a private civic joke of an experience that was, in fact, central to the development of industrial capitalism everywhere from Chicago to Kraków.
One of Mayfest’s most striking achievements, as a festival dedicated to presenting the best of Scottish ‘popular’ theatre alongside similar work from Europe and overseas, has been the consistency with which it has blasted that myth that the Glasgow experience is somehow unique, idiosyncratic. And now, in that tradition, the Tron Theatre’s Mayfest production of Michel Tremblay’s Les Belles-sæurs – a play born in the turbulent Québec of the 1960s, and now translated into a pithy, fierce, foul-mouthed urban Scots by Bill Findlay and Martin Bowman – offers us a portrait of a bunch of worn-out housewives in a Montréal tenement that matches the experience of generations of Glasgow women in almost uncanny detail.
The play is a merciless black comedy, set in 1965, about a woman called Germaine Lauzon, who has just won in a competition no less than a million Green Shield stamps, all of which have to be stuck into books before she can cash them in for lorryloads of consumer goods. The theme – likewise familiar from previous Mayfest hits like Tony Roper’s The Steamie – is the great tide of materialism and prosperity that began to sweep through working-class communities in the 1950s and ’60s, eroding the automatic solidarity that came with intense poverty, driving wedges of ambition and greed between neighbours who were once ‘all in the same boat’; the plot is beautifully structured around the slow, explosive build-up of envy and spleen among the neighbours, friends and family – fourteen in all – that Germaine invites to her stamp-sticking party.
Just as the Tremblay dialogue – written in the once-despised joual dialect of Québec – translates into urban Scots as though the two languages were long-lost twins, so the lives the women describe could hardly be more familiar to Glasgow audiences. There’s the humour, the stoicism, the astonishing lung-power and verbal forcefulness of mothers who were always yelling to their weans out of fourth-storey windows; there are the strong ethnic loyalties and religious pieties, the snobbery about language and education, the sexual repressiveness that goes with fear, ignorance and endless childbearing, the joyless distrust of fun and pleasure that is as strong in Jansenist Catholicism as it is in Scottish Presbyterianism.
But although the Tron’s director Michael Boyd has assembled a dazzlingly talented company of fifteen Scottish actresses for this production – led by the inimitable Una McLean as Germaine – it seems to me that the cast hasn’t quite, yet, got the measure of Tremblay’s intense social realism, of the extent to which his tragicomedy is rooted in the everyday experience of real women who might be the cast’s own mothers, aunties and grannies. Tremblay’s theatrical style in this play is complex, starting from a sympathetic bedrock of naturalistic observation, and then working up – through sheer intensity of feeling – into a series of stylised monologues and choral outbursts; the problem with Boyd’s production, as it stands, is that it seems to approach the play the other way round, throwing a battery of fancy and alienating theatrical devices at the text – grotesque costumes and gestures for the actresses, exaggerated spotlighting for the monologues, melodramatic background music, complex choreography – and then leaving the cast to fight their way back towards the sense of recognisable character that should underpin the theatrical effects.
Some have already found their way; I particularly liked Ann Louise Ross’s understated, deeply felt performance as the elder sister Gabrielle, and Gaylie Runciman as Yvette, a vague and washed-out little housewife whose rambling guest list for a family party won the biggest laugh of the night. But the rest of the cast look tense, nervy, a shade unreal and overemphatic, as if they were too busy getting into the right place at the right time, and sustaining their exotic ‘style’, to relax into Tremblay’s magnificent dialogue, and to give their full attention to the story the characters are trying to tell. The production has the strengths to match its weaknesses: it’s bold, harsh, ugly, theatrically exciting, in no danger of sliding into the lazy naturalism and rose-coloured nostalgia that too often infects plays about old working-class communities. But now that that unsentimental stance is established, I think it’s time to lower the pitch, to relax the texture of the production a little. If the audience is to sense the full depth of the play, and the significance, for Scotland now, of what Tremblay is doing in using the public reassertion of a despised language as the key to a recovery of self-knowledge and power amongst people almost ground down by poverty and hard work, then they must feel the real human tragedy that underlies the farce.
Richard Demarco, Edinburgh gallery owner and arts entrepreneur extraordinary, is one of those people who attracts high melodrama whatever he does; and his grand venture for the Edinburgh Festival of 1989 has run absolutely true to form. First there was the brilliant idea, hatched up last year between Demarco and the Sicilian theatre company Zattera di Babele, to stage Macbeth on the island of Inchcolm, a tiny, dramatic remnant of medieval Scotland – rocks, rough heathland, a ruined abbey, melancholy beaches, wheeling seabirds – in the middle of the Firth of Forth, in clear sight of the city of Edinburgh to the south, and the green fields of Fife to the north. Frank Dunlop bought the idea for his official Edinburgh Festival programme, and everything seemed set fair.
Then there was the disaster when, with barely two weeks to spare, the Sicilians disappeared into a casa di cura and cancelled their production. Demarco, determined not to fail, started pulling together a scratch company of Scottish actors under John Bett to create a substitute production. But the Edinburgh Festival withdrew its blessing, its tickets, and – most importantly – the box-office income it had already taken for the event, leaving Demarco (so he felt) with no alternative but to start selling his own tickets for the new production fast; ‘otherwise we would have had NO INCOME for the show, do you understand?’ he explains, at the pitch of his small but powerful lungs.
Then there was the inevitable cock-up, when at least thirty ticket-holders for the original Edinburgh Festival event – most of them from overseas, and blissfully unaware of the cancellation – turned up at Hawes Pier in South Queensferry (home of the Maid of the Forth, which plies to and from Inchcolm) to find their bookings no longer valid, and the Maid about to set sail without them; some occupied the gangplank, and two placid Queensferry policemen had to intervene. Finally, there were the elements, the lowering deep-grey sky over the firth, the driving rain, the wind that whipped Demarco’s standard-issue grey-wool blankets (essential for theatregoing in the Firth of Forth) around the bodies of the audience on the decks, and into which, as we finally drew away from the quay, the abandoned thirty shouted transatlantic and Sicilian curses at Demarco’s small retreating form.
And then, of course, there was the small miracle by which, as soon as we set sail towards the island, none of this seemed to matter. The rain drove, the wind blustered, the witches heaved up from the bowels of the ship as if they had risen from the water itself, to screech and whirl across the decks with their knowledge of evil and doom in the offing; never in my life will I forget the sound of the words ‘Though his bark shall not be lost | Yet it shall be tempest-toss’d!’ snatched from the mouth of the chief witch by the wind and echoing away across the steel-grey waves. The production we saw, when we finally reached the island, was a rough-and-ready affair, particularly in the fine detail of the performance; and savagely cut back (no banquet scene, no second visit to the witches) to compensate for the time we lost haggling on the quay.
But as a piece of staging it is a triumph, a succession of completely memorable images: dark figures drawn up in battle lines under a banner on the island’s skyline as the boat approached; two warriors battling and stumbling in the sand; the actors standing out like statues, symbols, ‘walking shadows’ against the ruins of the abbey, as we walked towards them across the deep natural amphitheatre of the island. Then the deep rumble of Gaelic laments, delivered by the black-robed figure of poet Aonghas MacNeacail, that seem to merge into this little shred of Scottish landscape as though they had been carved from the same stuff; the dank abbey courtyard where the knocking at the gate echoes like the clap of doom; and the lamp-lit peace of the upper room – hard won from the elements in a thick vault of stone – in which Lady Macbeth walks behind her flickering candle, and Lady Macduff is murdered. And always, the sound of wind, the feel of rough, damp wool against the body.
There were some fine performances, particularly from the women in the cast: Ann Louise Ross, Grace Glover and Kate Gartside as the witches, Gerda Stevenson’s Lady Macbeth, Sarah Collier’s exquisite Lady Macduff. But what mattered was the sense of closeness to the idea, the landscape, of medieval Scotland that fired Shakespeare’s imagination, and gave us this most wild and chilling of verse dramas. See Macbeth on Inchcolm – the wind whipping, the gulls screeching, the old capital across the stormy firth climbing grey and smoky towards its skyline – and you’ll never want to see it anywhere else; as for Richard Demarco, bandito of the arts, he’s a man who gives us immeasurably more than he takes.
The Moscow Art Theatre School’s production of The Crucible thundered into the Assembly Rooms this week on a wave of erotic energy powerful enough to shatter a few comfortable assumptions, both about the play itself, and about the way we use – or fail to use – sex in the theatre. The British actor Brian Cox, who directed the show as part of a cultural exchange between Britain and Russia, had hoped that the production might illuminate some spiritual parallels between Soviet oppression under Stalinism, and the American experience of McCarthyite anti-communism, which inspired Arthur Miller to write the play; but in the end nothing so cerebral emerges from this young, passionate reading of it.
What we get instead, in Vladimir Mashkov’s extraordinary performance as John Proctor, is a portrait of a sensual man trapped among the buttoned-up Puritans of seventeenth-century Salem, a man more relaxed in his body and in touch with himself than either his neighbours, or his virtuous wife Elizabeth, played with great dignity and feeling by Marina Kolesnichenko. His sensuality betrays him in his relationship with the cold-eyed Abigail, portrayed here by Irina Apeksimova as a smouldering teenage nymphet with a torrent of dark hair; there’s a clear hint that his sexy, flirtatious manner towards Abigail and her friends may have contributed to their hysteria. But as the action unfolds it becomes clear that Proctor’s sensuality, his earthiness, his unwillingness to suppress his physicality, is somehow linked to his inability, when the crunch comes, to deny what he knows to be true, and to compromise his sense of wholeness and identity by putting his name to the false confession that would save his life.
In many ways, Cox’s production – briskly staged against a simple, shifting set of panels that suggest the plain wooden buildings and cabins of New England – is a rough affair: it dispenses with many of the spiritual and political subtleties of the play, the age range of the Salem community is cruelly compressed to match the youth of the actors, and some of the body language and mannerisms are blatantly anachronistic. But it is brilliantly clear in its grasp of the basic conflict between those characters who have somehow remained in touch with themselves – Proctor, Giles Corey, the sensuous motherly figure of Rebecca Nurse, and, in the end, Elizabeth Proctor – and those who have learned, in repressing vital aspects of their own personality, how to deny and ignore other truths that are staring them in the face. In Mashkov’s magnificent bringing-together of the upfront, heroic, sensual tradition of Russian acting, and the inward, probing, reflective style of the classic English stage, Proctor’s sexuality finally becomes not a ‘fault’ to be expiated by a last virtuous gesture, but a vital aspect of the kind of personality that can remain complete, and true to itself, in the face of authoritarian pressure; and for this white-hot illumination of the link between sexual and political honesty, so often half-articulated in Miller’s work, we can only be grateful.
I can’t say that I approached the opening production of the Royal Lyceum’s autumn season with any great sense of excitement. Three and a quarter hours, I thought, of a comedy gone dusty with age; the last time I read Ben Jonson’s Volpone, in the late 1970s, it seemed to me a difficult and distant piece, too fierce and relentless in its satire on greed to be entirely dramatic, and – for all the brilliance of the writing – cluttered with commercial period detail of the most obscure kind.
Which only goes to show that a fine company of actors, thinking on their feet and feeling their way into a text, can always tell us more about a great play than we thought we knew. Because ten years on, after a decade of officially sanctioned greed in which looking after number one has been elevated to an article of economic faith, Jonson’s great satire emerges from Hugh Hodgart’s gorgeous and powerful production as a perfect play for today, its fierce sketches of blind money-lust and desperate enterprise drawn fresh from life, its endless ‘tricks’ and ‘devices’ and money-making projects a perfect mirror image of the scams and schemes that feature so heavily in the drama of the late 1980s. In a powerful programme note, Stephanie Dimond points out that Jonson was concerned, primarily, with ‘amorality and the thrust of capitalism’, and so he was: like the gruntings of a 1980s academic writing irascible letters to the New Statesman about the lost world of the 1960s, his poems are full of laments at London’s recent big-bang development into a teeming commercial capital in which cash is the only currency of human exchange, and of nostalgia for the old paternalistic social structure of the well-run country estate.
But what is striking, in this production, is how quickly the play’s theoretical relevance to contemporary Britain pays off, in practical, theatrical terms. From the first moment of the action, when Dudley Sutton as the avaricious old fox Volpone sits up in bed demanding to begin the day with a greeting to his ‘saint’, and a tattered red backcloth falls away to reveal a wall glittering, shrine-like, with encrusted gold plate and ornaments (which later doubles most effectively, in a different light, for a whole series of elaborate Venetian frontages), the audience seems to grasp the play’s central point, its satirical stance, perfectly and completely. And from that moment on, despite the essentially static nature of Jonson’s characterisation, and his heavy dependence on sheer wit and poetry to sustain the interest of the piece, they follow the twists and turns of his plot – the teasing and milking of the three hopeful inheritors by Volpone and his parasite Mosca, the outbreak of lust over the fair Celia, and the ludicrous subplot involving the moneymaking schemes of the English twit Sir Politic Would-Be – with a kind of rapt attention, as though Jonson was offering them some new, subversive and hugely entertaining insight into the way we live now.
And what’s doubly impressive about this powerful sense of communication and of relevance is that it’s achieved not by any obvious directorial manipulation – the play is set firmly, as Jonson demanded, in seventeenth-century Venice, and Gregory Smith’s sets, while gorgeous and witty in their faded plush-and-gold evocations of opulent parsimony, are stereotypically Venetian, in a Losey’s-Don-Giovanni-gone-overripe kind of way – but rather by the actors themselves, approaching the text with a kind of brilliant enjoyment, a sharpness of understanding, and a creative freedom and energy in reinterpreting Jonson’s dialogue, that makes every word of the text stand out like a jewel, sparkling with meaning and wit. Paul Spence’s Mosca, in particular, is a simply dazzling achievement, holding the frenetic action together on a steely thread of intelligence, athleticism, comic invention, audience rapport and sheer wicked wit; Dudley Sutton’s Volpone is likewise tremendously impressive and enjoyable, vigorous, clever, savagely humorous at others’ expense, and yet lyrical and beautiful of voice, perfectly capturing the sensual streak in Volpone’s character and in Jonson’s rich poetry.
But in the end, this Volpone could not work so well, achieve such a sense of substance and richness, if their empathy with the text was not shared by the whole of Hugh Hodgart’s fifteen-strong company, almost all of whom turn in extraordinarily strong and well-focused performances. For Jonson in this play shares not only our disgust at the rank materialism and gold-lust he portrays, but also our horrified fascination with it; like some of the satirists of the 1980s – David Hare and Howard Brenton, say, in Pravda – he is half-seduced by the savage logic of the marketplace, half in love with the glamorous evil and amoral ingenuity of his characters. Like those of us who oppose Thatcherism now, he hates the commercial jungle that has grown up before his eyes, and within which his animal characters – carrion birds and parasites – operate; and yet, like us, he finds it hard to resist its logic, or to envisage an alternative.
Ben Jonson is a playwright who has endured a long exile from the affection of British audiences, even when we are compelled to admire his skill and his brilliance. But we live in strange, alienating times; and with this lush, intelligent, brutal, and not-quite-English production we seem to be entering at last into the kind of intellectual and moral comradeship with Jonson’s big, dissident mind that his plays always craved. So perhaps, after centuries of cold respect and odious comparisons, the time has come when we can begin to love him as he deserves, for his toughness, his courage in dissent, and his fine, surly, humorous disgust at the spectacle of what men and women can become, when the flow of cash and capital is the only measure of worth they recognise, and the fragile social fabric of duty and mutual obligation finally breaks down.
Of all Shakespeare’s plays, Othello is the one that seems to have escaped the kind of modern reinterpretation that angers Shakespeare purists. There have been Freudian Hamlets, Marxist Twelfth Nights and feminist Tempests; but Othello seems to stand apart, a story of love and death so timelessly simple – man meets woman, man weds woman, evil genius plants suspicion in man’s mind, man slays woman in jealous rage – that radical rethinking seems unnecessary. As long as the play is acted out competently, and with reasonable sensitivity to the language, the force of Shakespeare’s storytelling will ensure that the audience responds on a soap-operatic level; so that the sheer technical mastery with which it spins its tragic yarn often becomes a theatrical smokescreen, behind which actors and directors can conceal a terrible vagueness about why the play still matters, and whether it does anything more than restate, like a rather classy episode of Dallas, the banal thought that jealousy is a terrible thing.
Ian Wooldridge’s new Othello at the Royal Lyceum in Edinburgh is a production of exactly this kind. It is handsome, tasteful, well-paced and competently acted; it keeps a reasonable grip on the audience’s attention by telling a strong story clearly and without fuss. Gregory Smith has designed a commendably restrained and uncluttered set, in which Venice is represented by a heavy thicket of black drapes lit by smoky flames from a hanging brass brazier, and Cyprus by a huge white-stone fortification, gleaming in sunny light, and topped (symbolically) by the shattered head of some great classical statue.
And within the space he creates, bright young actors come and go, each one apparently locked in a lonely effort to make something of his or her part. Gerda Stevenson’s Desdemona is sweet, determined, intelligent, dignified and eloquent; Paul Spence – as the loyal and wronged lieutenant Cassio – lays bare the meaning and poetry of his lines with a wonderful clarity; and in the absence of the kind of dramatic context that might begin to explain the sheer force of evil in Iago’s personality, Bill Leadbitter works away powerfully on his obvious vices of envy and racial hatred. But all of them, in the end, come up against the handsome blank that is Burt Caesar’s Othello – holding the character’s great love and great agony firmly at arm’s length, as though it was all too messy to take seriously – and against the sheer artistic deadness of a production that, like so many Othellos, seems to have no motive beyond getting through the story in a dignified and professional manner.
Which is a pity; because the more I look at Othello, the more it seems like one of the most profound plays about sexual politics ever written, a play in which the glorious and fulfilling life force represented by Othello and Desdemona’s sexual love is destroyed, inch by inch, by those deathly macho forces in Judaeo-Christian culture – much better understood now than a generation ago – that depend for their survival on the failure of sexual happiness, on frustration, anger, and the perversion of creativity. Iago is one of those sick military misogynists – significantly estranged from his own wife Emilia – who is happiest among gangs of other men, drinking, putting the boot in, insulting women and using them without love; what enrages him is Othello’s defection from those values, and he cannot rest until he has destroyed his life-affirming love and dragged it down. It’s because this titanic battle between love and death is the true centre of the play that the final scene, in which Emilia finally abandons her embittered allegiance to Iago to roar out her knowledge of Othello and Desdemona’s true love, is always enthralling; and why the actress who plays Emilia – in this case the gentle Ann Louise Ross, in superb form – so often emerges as the true heroine of the play.
At times, in Edinburgh, the audience almost seem to be taking up this powerful contemporary theme of their own accord, pushing the production towards it; when they see Iago deliberately taunting Cassio into drunkenness, for example, they recognise his evil kind of machismo as something absolutely alive in their world. But this fragmented Othello has no means of building on their response; and although individual performers do what they can, a production that so lacks a central drive – call it heart, guts, intellectual passion or what you will – inevitably amounts to less than the sum of its parts.
And so it was just a few weeks after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the epoch-making changes it signalled, that Glasgow began its year as European City of Culture. There was a huge pulse of international connection in the year’s theatre work, both in Glasgow and elsewhere. The major theme of the year, though – international in its reach, but drawn straight from the heart of Glasgow’s recent history – was the story of the death of heavy industry, and of the struggle of a great industrial city to find a new and viable identity; and the new performance spaces opened up by Glasgow 1990 – The Arches under Central Station, Tramway, the Harland and Wolff engine shed at Govan where Bill Bryden staged his huge spectacle The Ship, and the St Rollox Railway Works in Springburn – spoke volumes about that history, and the scars it had left behind. 1990 brought many other significant events in Scottish theatre, of course. It was, for example, the year that saw the first appearance, in a cluster of tents in Inverleith Park, of Edinburgh’s Scottish International Children’s Festival, which went on – under the inspired leadership of Tony Reekie – to become one of the world’s leading children’s theatre festivals, eventually changing its name to Imaginate, and helping to inspire a generation of fine new Scottish work in theatre for children, from companies like Catherine Wheels and Wee Stories. Yet it was the dramatic story of Glasgow, its history and rebirth, that caught imaginations far beyond Scotland, in 1990; and overall, this was a year when it was a true privilege to be a theatre critic and arts journalist, watching a great city, and a nation, wrestle with its own story, find its international resonances, form new friendships and alliances, and begin to move forward, into a different kind of future.
Is it easy to be Scottish, at the moment? Not particularly; not with the unacceptable face of nationalism bursting into prominence all over the decaying Soviet Empire, and posing the most sharp and uncomfortable questions about the precise nature of the movement towards national self-determination and self-confidence that has been preoccupying Scottish artists, in one way and another, these last fifteen years.
Communicado’s Jock Tamson’s Bairns – created by the award-winning team of writer Liz Lochhead and director Gerry Mulgrew, and presented at the Tramway Theatre as the theatrical opening shot of Glasgow’s 1990 celebrations – was committed from the outset to an exploration of Scotland and the Scottish psyche. Its title comes from an old Scottish saying – ‘We’re all Jock Tamson’s Bairns’ (i.e. ‘whatever our pretensions, we were all conceived in the same inelegant way’) – which is meant to exemplify the sturdy egalitarianism of the Scottish temperament. It opened on Burns Night, the birthday of Robert Burns, the nearest thing Scotland has to a popular national feast; and it was designed, from the start, to take the celebratory form of a Burns Supper.
Under the circumstances, it was hard not to fear that the show would fall victim to the temptations either of nationalist schmaltz or – more likely, given Lochhead and Mulgrew’s track-record as iconoclasts – a kind of ugly, reductive self-flagellation. That it succeeds in avoiding both pitfalls, and emerges as a tough, clever, funny, fast-moving and completely absorbing two-hour journey through the lower depths of Scottish culture, is a tremendous tribute not only to the skills of the brilliant thirty-strong company Mulgrew has assembled, but also to something deeper, a kind of clear, hard-won personal understanding of what can and can’t be said about their fractious homeland, that seems to shape and strengthen the work of every artist involved.
It has to be said, of course, that the picture the show presents of Scotland is far from pretty. It begins with a burial, acted out on a rough, rain-drenched pile of boulders in the Tramway’s barn-like outer hall; as the coffin is laid in the earth, the cast sing, with utter seriousness, the great Flyting (dispute) of life and death by the contemporary poet Hamish Henderson, as if to emphasise the underlying intensity of the struggle between destructive and positive forces in the nation’s life.
The dead man – a hopeless drunk, played with a wonderful, baffled, slack-limbed lyricism by the dancer Frank McConnell – descends into hell, and the audience moves into the main auditorium; and there we encounter the Bairns, a hollow-eyed, scrappily dressed, but completely undaunted underworld rabble of tattered Scottish types – the bleating old granny full of fatalistic sayings, the whining wean, the overpowering mammy stuffing food and patent medicines into the protesting child, the coalminer granddad muttering about how ‘Burns was the first communist, and don’t you let them tell you any different, son.’ Basted, piped in, orated over and then slashed open like the archetypal haggis, the poor drunk sees his lurid tartan entrails pulled out, mulled over and used as the raw materials for a nightmare rerun of his unattractive life, featuring grunting alienation in the parental home, regimentation at school, loveless teenage sex. There’s a brief flirtation with ‘A Man’s a Man for A’ That’ nationalism – brilliantly metamorphosed, in a brilliant one-minute sequence, into an abject vulnerability to the fortunes of the Scottish football team – and then a great deal of drink.
Finally, through a strangely interrupted retelling of the narrative poem Tam o’Shanter, the show almost collapses under the weight of the questions it has raised, and moves into a searing but perhaps slightly overstated criticism of the failure of open, fulfilling contact between male and female that Lochhead feels is at the heart of the Scottish malaise; at the end, the cast gather and pass round a bowl in a grim parody of the Last Supper, like a bunch of exhausted disciples hardly daring to hope for redemption.
So much for the ugliness of the story the show tells; but the process of telling is shot through with so much humour and brilliance that the effect is anything but depressing. Communicado is dedicated to the idea of collaboration among all the theatrical art forms, and in this show – which runs for two hours with hardly a weakness in the pace and fluidity of the staging – Mulgrew has excelled himself, over a ten-week rehearsal period, in forcing what could have been a shapeless collage of dance, music, song, text and visual imagery into a powerful impressionistic coherence.
Liz Lochhead’s text – deliberately spare and fragmented, designed to complement and enrich the action rather than shape it – is central to the mood of the piece; on the one hand, its ironic and self-critical tone is relentless, shattering what’s left of Scots language into parodic fragments, mercilessly sending up the clichés and cant of traditional Scottish speech; on the other, it takes these fragments and blends them into a mosaic of such wit and colour that it affirms the possibilities of the language, and the people who speak it, more positively than any reverent reconstruction. Then there’s the music by Karen Wimhurst, which takes a few traditional Scottish cadences, and drives them through a strange instrumental ensemble – saxophone, piano, cello, violin – to create a truly superb score which propels the action relentlessly forward. And Wimhurst’s original music is counterpointed, always and everywhere, by the sheer limpid beauty of Burns’ own songs, as sung by Rod Paterson and Christine Kydd; even at the heart of this cheeky nightmare vision, there’s no attempt to gainsay the sheer miracle that produced this pure strand of erotic freedom and lyrical loveliness from the hard, rocky soil of Ayrshire.
But in the end, the strength of Jock Tamson’s Bairns lies in the performances: the company contains the very best young Scottish actors of the under-forty generation, and they throw every scrap of their individual experience and wisdom and cultural integrity into creating a choric presence of extraordinary vividness, detail, clarity and strength. What the Bairns say to us is yes, the Scottish psyche is a mess, in this, this and this specific way; but so long as we have the guts to look the mess straight in the eye, to tell it like it is with humour and elegance and skill and panache, then there’s every reason for hope, and no excuse for despair. The detail of this show is undeniably for Scots, and perhaps – interestingly, given its status in the 1990 programme – more for Scots than for Glaswegians, who have their own special cultural history. But its mood, its tone, its exhilarating mixture of powerful theatrical confidence and merciless self-criticism, pushes it to the centre of the debate about small-nation politics in the 1990s, and about the role the arts can play in enriching and humanising those politics. I hope it finds the audience it deserves, both in Glasgow, and across Europe.
Alan Spence’s The Sailmaker began, ten years ago, as a lyrical, perfect short story about a bright working-class boy growing up in the tenement streets of Govan in the 1960s. Its mood is gentle and elegiac; and when it was first made into a play, at the Traverse in 1982, I remember being irritated both by the self-consciously poetical quality of the writing, which seemed desperately untheatrical, and, more importantly, by the self-righteous and self-pitying quality of performance it seemed to provoke in its all-male Scottish cast. In essence, The Sailmaker is about the death of an era of skilled manual labour on the Clyde. But true to its short-story origins, it approaches the theme not head-on and dramatically, but by a slow, exquisite build-up of detail, the purpose of which only emerges clearly in the last half-hour of a ninety-minute show. Eight years ago, I remember an impression of four actors groping their way through a mass of material which they knew had a powerful and sad significance, without a clear sense of where they were going; and the result was more sentimental or nostalgic than tragic.
But in those eight years, while Spence’s story has remained like a still, clear point of remembered experience, the city itself has moved round to a completely different vantage-point. These have been the years of Mayfest and Glasgow’s Miles Better, of the born-again civic image and massive post-industrial art works like George Wyllie’s Straw Locomotive and Paper Boat. The city’s consciousness of itself, and of the significance of its industrial history, has undergone a radical transformation, so that the cast of Alan Lyddiard’s new TAG production of The Sailmaker – now playing at the Tron Theatre before going on tour – are able to approach the text with a much stronger sense of its meaning beyond the personal and pathetic, and therefore with an artistic maturity and discipline that makes sentimentality impossible.
The story – which begins with the death of the wife/mother who held the home together – revolves around the relationship between Alec and his father Davie. Once a skilled sailmaker, Davie still keeps his handmade canvas toolbag and all his tools in the house. But when we first meet him, he’s working as a door-to-door collector for a hire-purchase company; and by the end, he has become one of the long-term unemployed. Meanwhile Alec climbs the ladder of success at school, passing his 11-plus, drifting away from his scuffling, football-kicking friends in the street, moving into a world of academic information that seems absolutely divorced from the real experience of his father’s life in Govan. On the brink of university, he becomes plagued by a feeling that he’s ‘lost something’, and begins to make links between some of the ‘facts’ he’s learned (‘Glasgow made the Clyde, and the Clyde made Glasgow’) and the meaning of his father’s life; but by then, Davie’s loss of identity and self-respect has become so complete that he and Alec see nothing wrong, one cold night, in burning every ‘spare’ piece of wood in the house, including his wife’s favourite chair, his sailmaking tools, and an old toy yacht of great symbolic significance.
The Sailmaker is not a perfect play. Its development is still dangerously slow, and it still allows audiences to slide too often into a cosy, nostalgic response to its period detail, particularly its affectionate, soft-centred recreation of Protestant bigotry in the back streets. But in Alan Lyddiard’s vigorously paced but emotionally spacious production – lifted and energised by a beautiful, unobtrusive musical score from Gordon Dougall, who also plays Alec’s cheerfully bigoted Uncle Billy – the detailed sensitivity and strength of Spence’s writing compensates for any structural weakness. Paul Hickey and Andrew Barr play beautifully together as Alec and Davie, Hickey in particular turning in a memorably intelligent and disciplined performance; and although Spence has no solution to offer to the tragedy of the Clydeside worker – to the fate of a whole class, born in the industrial revolution, that has lost its work, its raison d’être, its outlet for creativity, its pride – his play burns in the mind like a bright, true gem made from that experience, sad but beautiful, and making beauty out of the sadness.
In the week when the Nicaraguan people decided that the struggle for independence from the US sphere of influence was no longer worth the candle, George Byatt’s Brus – playing at the Tron Theatre in Glasgow for a short season – could hardly be more relevant. In essence, it’s a long dramatic poem about Scotland’s successful war of independence against the English in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth century; and it debates the key questions about such a struggle – whether the working-up of hatred along national lines can be right, however just the cause, and whether the natural yearning for dignity and self-determination can ever be worth such terrible bloodshed – in a formidable, impressive, and occasionally electrifying text, which mixes Scots and English, verse and prose, to powerful effect. As many people died on the field of Bannockburn on one day – 23 June 1314 – as in the whole Nicaraguan-Contra war; Byatt makes you feel the pride and horror of such a victory in your guts.
Byatt’s company – known as Theatre PKF, or Peace Keeping Force – also specialises in a kind of simple, Brechtian, workshop-style theatre of which we don’t see enough. The actors wear modern clothes, the set consists of a few simple wooden poles, there’s no attempt at naturalistic casting: Brus is played here by a strange young girl with straight blonde hair, a flying jacket, a pronounced lisp, and a curiously commanding stare. Most importantly, the atmosphere is easygoing and discursive, without that heavy pall of politeness, reverence and sheer social pretension that hangs between stage and audience in most British theatres. PKF are a company with something important and topical to say, and a challenging way of saying it; and for the first five minutes of their opening performance at the Tron, I felt we might be on the threshold of one of those brilliant theatrical occasions when performers literally startle an audience into a real intellectual and emotional engagement with what’s happening on stage.
But having created that chance for themselves, it has to be said that PKF largely blow it, through a combination of sloppy casting, under-rehearsed performance, and sheer indulgence in the face of Byatt’s powerful but overwritten script. For the point about this kind of ‘poor theatre’ is that it demands more, not less, of performers. In particular, the absence of naturalistic movement and strong visual images places a tremendous emphasis on the strength, colour, expressiveness and control of the actors’ voices, on which they have to depend to create character, to set scenes, to reflect the subtle political alternations of Scots and English in the script, and to generate clear variations of pace and dynamism, between battle scenes and laments, naturalistic sequences and highly stylised soliloquies. The harsh truth about Byatt’s company – which includes the well-known Scottish blues singer and actress Terry Neason, as well as two or three complete unknowns – is that exactly four of them have that kind of vocal skill and capacity, and three of them do not. The performance is therefore dogged with recurrent problems of inaudibility, sagging pace, and sheer narrative confusion; and the result is a three-hour-and-ten-minute endurance test – not counting the post-performance discussion – which only rarely achieves the kind of intensity, pace and precision this script needs.
There are two good things to be said about all this. The first is that this production is bound to improve in the course of the run, as the actors become more confident in performance, and better able to take the script by the scruff of the neck. The second is that even in the middle of such terrible, inconsiderate, bum-aching boredom, the power and relevance of the theme and the writing keep cutting through indifference and hostility, picking up echo after echo of modern self-determination struggles from South Africa to the Baltic. It’s therefore exasperating beyond words to see Theatre PKF make such heavy weather of material with such potential. For showing us the best of radical theatre – conviction, courage, a willingness to stand unadorned before an audience and tell the story like it is – they deserve support and love; for their lack of discipline in achieving an effective standard of performance, and their plain indulgence towards a fine but unwieldy script, they deserve – if they’ll excuse such a belligerent thought – a belt round the ear.
It was Kenneth Tynan who boldly wrote, after the first night of Look Back in Anger in 1956, that John Osborne’s explosion of rage against the stifling social atmosphere of the time was ‘the best young play of its decade’. History has tended to raise an eyebrow at Tynan for rushing to judgement when the fifties still had four years to run. But I doubt whether any other work from that strange decade of jazz, repression and rampant domesticity could storm on to the stage at the Royal Lyceum and hold it, for three hours, with the kind of energy and authority that radiates from Osborne’s text in this compelling production by Ian Wooldridge. Look Back in Anger never was a likeable play, but the years have done nothing to diminish its dramatic force, or the classical strength of its three-act structure; and Wooldridge’s production – built around an electrifying performance from Phil Smeeton as Jimmy Porter, Osborne’s working-class graduate anti-hero – offers some absorbing insights into why the play has worn so well.
Of course Look Back in Anger is to some extent a period piece, locked into the peculiar social structure of post-war Britain. Osborne seems, for example, to attach considerable importance to the Church, as a symbol of reactionary and repressive attitudes. Today that imagery has lost much of its force; and so have most of Jimmy’s detailed jibes against the manners and attitudes of Alison’s upper-middle-class family, which belongs to a tradition of noblesse oblige and colonial service now entirely defunct.
But if Osborne’s social politics are tied to their period, the play’s savage undercurrent of sexual politics is not. Seen from the vantage point of 1990, the play looks increasingly like a frank, brilliant and romantic study of rogue male energy sloshing around in a society becalmed by stagnation and peace. Robbed (or so he feels) of ‘good, brave causes’ to fight for, Jimmy declares that he and his pal Cliff have no real option but to ‘be butchered by the women’, and instinctively turns the battering ram of his energy on to the politics of his personal life. In his rage against an establishment world view propped up by sexual prudery and polite lies, he demands Alison’s complete rejection of her background, and complete loyalty to him. As she explains to Helena, ‘It’s a matter of allegiances’; and although Jimmy’s behaviour towards both women shows a level of rage, fear, misogyny and aggression that is quite pathological, there’s also something desperately human and familiar about it. It’s as if there’s a recognisable shred of Jimmy lurking in most male psyches; and in the world of the play, there’s never any real doubt that Alison is right to prefer her husband’s blood-and-guts realism, and the true erotic bond between them which is itself a touchstone of reality, to the sanitised and euphemistic world of her parents.
All of which makes the play a fascinating and challenging one for a generation brought up on the new perspectives of feminism. What it says is that men and women should be loyal to the sexual bond between them, not only because men run mad when they feel rejected by their womenfolk, but because erotic passion is a force which can break though barriers of wealth and class, create something new and positive out of something old and atrophied; the implication is that women must put up with a hell of a lot from men who really need them, because that’s the only way to keep the human pageant on the road.
Of course, it’s a reactionary thesis by modern standards. But at a time when relations between the sexes seem to have reached such a petulant, mistrustful stand-off, it’s fascinating to see this traditionalist view of marriage argued with such force, and performed with such conviction. For Phil Smeeton, as Jimmy, not only imitates but absolutely embodies the kind of fierce, virile nervous energy that drives the character; and although Rosaleen Pelan’s Alison is as slight as she is quiet, there’s a sense that her stubborn strength of will is at least equal to his frightening bluster. Stuart McQuarrie’s Cliff is a perfectly judged little cameo of the loving, sexually neutral friend who helps mediate their taut relationship; and the strength of the ensemble playing between these three indicates that however unpalatable Osborne’s sexual politics may be to the post-feminist consciousness, his sexy old images of male aggression absorbed and redeemed by a stubborn, unfailing female love have a good deal of life in them yet.
A couple of months ago, at a conference in Glasgow, I heard the playwright Iain Heggie quote the idea of theatre as a kind of public dreaming: the job of a playwright, he suggested, is to articulate the dream his audience needs at a given moment. For all its faults, James Kelman’s Hardie and Baird: The Last Days – the first full-length production of the 1990 Traverse season – is a play that has that quality of hitting the right theme at the right time. First commissioned for radio twelve years ago, and now thoroughly reworked for the stage, the play is set in the prison cells of Edinburgh and Stirling castles in the year 1820, and explores the state of mind of the radical weavers John Baird and Andrew Hardie during the weeks before their execution for treason as leaders of the Scottish popular rebellion of that year. Like Hector MacMillan’s The Rising, Hardie and Baird is written partly out of rage that that rebellion – for universal suffrage, annual parliaments and Scottish independence – has been so largely hidden from official history, and is barely taught in Scottish schools; but those who are expecting a rousing anti-government polemic full of obvious contemporary parallels are in for a disappointment.
For Kelman’s concern is not so much with the arrogance and judicial gerrymandering of the British state (although that forms the essential background of the story) as with Hardie and Baird’s tremendous battle for spiritual composure, as they live through their long days of solitary confinement in Edinburgh and Stirling, knowing that their chances of reprieve and survival are slim. The play emerges, finally, as a kind of long dramatic tribute to the tremendous spiritual strength of Andrew Hardie, whose radical Christian faith – undisturbed by the hideous establishment cant of some of the clergy sent to ‘comfort’ him – transforms his imprisonment into a profound experience of self-discovery, a journey into his own heart and into his faith which leaves him calm, and at times almost exalted. Baird, by contrast, cannot let go of the simple rights and wrongs of the earthly battle in which they have been engaged. He rages against the injustice of the situation, lapses into hostile silence and near-madness, torments himself with regrets about the circumstances of their betrayal and arrest; he cannot help knowing that Hardie, though much younger, is the ‘better’, stronger man in this final ordeal.
The problem with the play – although it’s directed with exquisite sensitivity by Ian Brown, and played with tremendous concentration and feeling by Simon Donald as Hardie and Tam Dean Burn as Baird – is that the fundamental balance between the two characters never shifts. Their individual moods change, as they tussle with their mental and physical demons, and Simon Donald’s Hardie, in particular, often seeks to convey through body language an agitation hardly expressed in the text. The canting clergy come and go; the men are moved from solitary confinement into a shared cell. But Hardie begins with his faith well-developed, sophisticated and intact, and goes into death in the same condition; Baird finds the Christian message of acceptance and forgiveness harder from the start, and is still fighting the inevitable at the end. And what this means, in a play well over two hours in length, is a great deal of repetition, a steady, dense restatement of spiritual and emotional positions that never moves, never develops, never has any dramatic dynamism.
But given that limitation, Hardie and Baird is a remarkably absorbing piece of work. It reflects what I think is a growing radical interest in spiritual and moral strength, as the only real weapons poor people have against the might of money and the state, and the only weapons any of us have against the inevitability of suffering and death. It features two compelling and heroic performances; it’s presented with some style and great feeling, on a dark Traverse stage filled with the strong, deliberately anachronistic rhythms of a new score by Richard Heacock. But in the end, it lacks the nerve actually to dramatise its theme; and Kelman’s profound and moving understanding of the right relationship between political morality here on earth, and faith in something better beyond it, will therefore have less impact than it deserves.
Coming innocent and wide-eyed to the Royal Shakespeare Company’s Les Liaisons Dangereuses – that grand theatrical phenomenon of the 1980s, now arrived at last in Scotland for a three-month run at the Mitchell Theatre – is a strange and disturbing experience, if only because it so precisely reflects the atmosphere of the decade just gone. Somewhere within it, after all, there is a play of steel, a hard, bleak thing about the collapse of idealism and morality in personal relationships. The story of the dangerous alliance between the Marquise de Merteuil and her former lover Valmont, of the cold, competitive ethic of sexual exploitation on which it is based, and of the way in which that code destroys the possibility of love between Mme de Tourvel and Valmont – must strike a powerful and terrible chord with anyone who fully experienced the emotional wastelands of the 1980s, the collapse of expectations about fidelity, trust, and long-term commitment, the wholesale junking of marriages. De Merteuil’s retreat from her love for Valmont into an impregnable fortress of self-reliance and power-plays is something I recognise; Valmont’s inability to resist Merteuil’s demands – embodied in the hideous scene where he deliberately smashes the relationship with de Tourvel that has brought him the greatest joy of his life – is even more interesting, as a study of the wanton emotional destructiveness to which many men feel compelled whenever real closeness threatens their self-sufficiency.
Yet Les Liaisons – in this elegant, restrained reworking by David Leveaux of the original RSC production – reflects the ethos of the 1980s in another, and even more disturbing way. For as a piece of theatre, it crucially lacks the courage of its own bleakness. Here and there – in the strained, powdered face of Emma Piper’s Merteuil, or in the vocal harshness of Valmont’s final ultimatum to her – you catch a glimpse of the ugliness and violence implicit in a plot which revolves around the deliberate seduction and moral destruction of innocents. But by and large, the spectacle is suffocatingly pretty, played out on a set of pale, slatted boudoir screens that lusciously pick up the sequence of soft pastel colour tones – pink, gold, white, grey-green, powder blue – imposed on them by the lighting. The costumes – just one for each character – are quite beautiful representations of the fashion of those other ’80s, the 1780s, in which the action is set. Even worse, the terrible story is played with far too frequent and forced a recourse to humour. It’s right that the Countess’s cynical bons mots about sex and marriage should rouse the occasional uneasy laugh; it is absolutely wrong that Valmont’s casual seduction of the fifteen-year-old convent girl Cécile should be written and played for easy comedy, perpetuating – and inviting the audience to laugh along with – the sexist lie that when women say no to sex, they usually mean yes.
I was deeply impressed, in the end, by the playing of Emma Piper’s soft-voiced Countess and, particularly, by Pip Miller’s Valmont, a man surprised by the residual power of moral beauty and love; the bleakness of the play’s closing moments is perfect and spine-chilling, and the quality of the supporting performances never falters, despite the dangerously slow pace at which the production is played. But overall, I was left with the impression of a piece of theatre in which the comfortable, elegant packaging somehow defies the content. For the Glasgow audience – the biggest I’ve seen at a Culture City performance for some time – the messages conveyed by such an event have more to do with the effortless confidence and technical superiority of top-class English theatre than with the emotional devastation actually referred to in the plot; and that cannot be what was intended, either by Laclos, who wrote the novel, or Christopher Hampton, who wrote the play.
The Maly Theatre of Leningrad’s Brothers and Sisters has slipped quietly into Britain: playing in Glasgow only, for a short five-day run in front of thin midsummer audiences, this latest contribution to Glasgow’s World Theatre Season has attracted far less attention than it deserves. But those who came to the Theatre Royal on Saturday to see the complete, all-day performance of this two-part, six-hour epic will know that they have experienced the strongest, most comprehensive and most eloquent response to post-war Soviet experience ever seen on a British stage; and their understanding of the situation in the Soviet Union will be permanently changed and enriched by it.
Adapted from a four-part novel by Fyodor Abramov, Brothers and Sisters takes its title from the opening words of Stalin’s famous 1941 address to the Soviet people, in which he asked his ‘brothers and sisters’ in the struggle against fascism to give everything they had – their lives, their wealth, their last ounce of physical strength – to the Great Patriotic War against Hitler’s Germany. The novel and the play tell the story, based on Abramov’s own background, of the immediate post-war experience of a village in northern Russia that took Stalin’s injunction to heart. As the play opens, the war is ending, and the women who worked themselves into the ground during the struggle, ploughing and sowing the land, logging in the forests, running the commune, raising the children – ‘and not one of them died’ – are looking forward to the return of their men from the army. All through the war, their brave little village chairman Anfisa (a wonderful, pivotal performance from Tatyana Shestakova) has been telling them, ‘Patience, women, after the war we will begin to live’; the basic theme of Brothers and Sisters – seen through the eyes of a boy-on-the-verge-of-manhood called Mikhail (or ‘Mishka’) who lived and worked through the war with the women – has to do with Stalinism’s absolute betrayal of that hope, and with the decline of the people into a terrible and bitter poverty – sometimes near-starvation – no longer made bearable by idealism, comradeship, and faith in the future.
Brothers and Sisters is not, in itself, an outstanding piece of theatrical writing. The Maly Company produces its adaptations by a long-drawn-out collaborative process of experiment, rehearsal and selection, and this process remains obvious in the episodic, sometimes jerky structure of the piece; sometimes I missed the sense of context that a more unified ‘concept’ production can give. In the first half, for instance, I found it difficult to conjure up, from a script which naturally highlights key moments of change and celebration, a sense of the unrelenting physical work which dominated the villagers’ lives. And I was troubled throughout by the problem of perspective created by Mishka’s special position. On the page, he might be able to act as a conduit for a narrative about the experience and heroism of Russia’s much-neglected women; in the theatre, Pyotr Semak’s handsome Mishka emerges as a hero in his own right, constantly drawing the focus away from the women to whom the text pays so much lip service.
But the Maly are evidently a company more interested in the content of their work than in a burnished perfection of form; and their emphasis on a story that has deep personal meaning for them, combined with an intense Stanislavskian naturalism in creating character, produces a depth and intensity of acting that sweeps away minor imperfections of structure like a river in spate. In detail, the show is exquisitely staged around a simple log platform, which shifts and tilts with the changing scenes. The lighting is perfect, now harvest-warm, now glinting whitely through drifting snowflakes, and against this background Lev Dodin’s thirty-six-strong company give a heart-stopping ensemble performance, living with the characters, moving and dancing with them; the village celebrations, for instance, have a half-hearted, broken quality that is utterly credible, as if the little joyful shreds of folk song and dance were slowly fading from the memory along with the moral universe that produced them. As Dodin points out, the great strength of Abramov’s story lies in its refusal to accept the simple ‘good people/bad system’ stereotypes of dissident Soviet literature. It lets us see not only the hard work and heroism of the villagers, but also their sexual repressiveness and their casual cruelty towards outsiders; it lets us see the million threads that link the quality of political life to the quality of personal life, and how the creeping individualism of the post-war world undermined the communist system, just as the system failed the people.
Above all, though, Brothers and Sisters reminds us of the almost unimaginable scale of the struggles the Soviet people have waged in this century. It’s a show big enough to contain an utterly damning indictment of Stalinism, while at the same time allowing a glimpse of the astonishing achievement of the Soviet system at its height, of the way in which a potent mix of socialist ideals and traditional Christian morality once mobilised a poor, largely peasant people to fight, to endure, to give themselves up to the collective, and abandon personal ambition, on a scale unimaginable in the modern West. It’s from the contrast between this intense idealism on one hand, and the shabby moral chaos of modern Russia on the other, that Brothers and Sisters draws its heart-rending tragic energy; but the very completeness of its vision reminds us that the death of communism will not mean the end of the great, dangerous human impulse to try to build a heaven on earth.
Test Department’s The Second Coming – staged in the vast semi-derelict acres of the old Caley Railway Engine Works at Springburn – is one of the most compelling and tantalising events of Glasgow 1990 so far. Compelling, because it hurls itself in a bold, thrilling, formally inventive style at some questions about the ‘heritage industry’ that desperately need to be asked; tantalising because it’s too light on dramatic and structural development to make its point clearly, and because, in the end, it attacks the wrong target. Staged by Angus Farquhar with a cast of sixty, including only eighteen professional actors and musicians, the show is a stunning visual and aural spectacle, which uses the great vistas of the space – its groves of metal pillars, its low shed roof, its great, gliding engine-repair platform, its discarded iron wheels and old, rusty flatcars running on ancient rails – to sketch the story of a dreadful, fateful turning point in the near future of the British working class.
Structured as a seventy-five-minute rock oratorio in three parts, with libretto by Neal Ascherson, the show opens with three guides – smart young women in brightly coloured parodies of public-school uniform – explaining that the once-mighty industrial ‘workforce’, finding itself redundant after centuries of hard labour, is being given a final chance of work as actors in a living heritage museum, commemorating their industrial past. The workforce take up their positions, and the opening recitative modulates into a long, impassioned fugue for voice and percussion – the emotional heart of the show – in which the company invoke, at an ever-increasing pitch of intensity, the deafening sounds, the physical movement, the frenzied atmosphere of the engine shed at the height of production. Welding sparks fly in the dark recesses of the shed; light plays dramatically through the vast spaces on human forms locked into a great, rhythmic pattern of effort and labour as the cast beat furiously on drums and wheelbases, do Japanese-style company exercises on the moving repair platform, heave old flatcars along the rails. At the height of the frenzy, great white sails unfurl in the far depths of the space, and on to them are projected huge images of steam engines, gathering speed, thundering into action; I can’t remember seeing a piece of theatre which more powerfully captures the essence of heavy industrial labour, the brutal weight of the materials, the noise, the back-breaking effort, the sense of danger, the almost fearful pride at the Promethean power of the great engines created by these nineteenth-century industrial processes.
It’s at this point, though, that the structure of the piece begins to falter. The guides begin to quote from an absurd speech – given several years ago by Enoch Powell to the Royal Society of St George – about the true nature of England, its history and destiny. When the workforce fail to react, the guides attack them with a snarling, authoritarian ferocity, accusing them of envy, greed, insubordination, and a want of patriotism. As their voices fade into cacophony the show enters its final phase, in which the workforce are driven around the recesses of the space by terrible searchlight beams, like groups of holocaust victims in the shunting yards of hell; finally, through great open doors at the far end of the shed, they heave into action a dark giant machine – terrifying and aggressive in its shape and markings – that forms the final image of the piece.
There are two problems with this. The first is that the failure to give the workforce any character or words – we see them only as matchstick figures in a huge interior landscape – makes it difficult to attach real emotional weight to their suffering, or to understand why the guides should turn on them with such fury. The second is that the extreme fascist-romantic English triumphalism expressed by the guides (and by Powell) rings no bells at all in Glasgow: in Culture City, the experience of right-wing Tory government has more to do with sharp-suited PR men and crude market forces than with dreams of feudal order and island destiny, and the temptation to nostalgia comes mainly in the familiar cloth-capped form of sentimental artefacts about Glasgow’s glorious working-class past.
If Ascherson, the writer, and Farquhar, the director, had spent more time in Glasgow this last half-decade, they might have understood more about the precise forms of ancestor-worship that go on in the west of Scotland, and might have been able to address the burning question of when a legitimate hunger to tell, retell and understand the city’s traumatic working-class history (well illustrated, in an entrance-hall exhibition, by pictures of the physical devastation of Springburn in the last four decades) becomes a reactionary habit of nostalgia, inertia and political defeatism. But despite the show’s imperfections, the world’s press, descending on Glasgow this weekend for Bill Bryden’s prestigious The Ship project, would be well advised to take a dose of The Second Coming as an antidote; if only because it reminds us that remembering and honouring the past is no simple business, and that in cities like Glasgow – with so much past, and so little obvious future – it can become a dangerous obsession.
It was a rough day in central Scotland. By late morning, the rain in Glasgow had reached monsoon strength, and it stayed that way throughout the afternoon. Saturday shoppers gave up in disgust, low-lying bits of the city disappeared under water, the trains between Glasgow and Edinburgh were delayed by flooding. But Welfare State International, along with 250 schools and organisations throughout Strathclyde, had been planning for over a year to get Glasgow ‘all lit up’ on the evening of 6 October 1990: over 8000 lanterns – ranging from tiny solo efforts to huge float-sized light sculptures on the backs of lorries – were being glued and painted and given their finishing touches, from Argyll down to the depths of Ayrshire. The event was to be the centrepiece of the community programme of Glasgow’s year as European City of Culture, the final answer to those who said that 1990 was all posh and Pavarotti. Welfare State had been into every school and community hall in the region, encouraging the creative urge, advising on techniques and materials; nothing was going to stop them now. And nothing did. At six o’clock, as dusk gathered over the city, the rain obligingly drizzled to a halt. A big, noisy community choir assembled in a temporary bandstand at George Square – flanked by big, white lantern models of Glasgow Cathedral and the People’s Palace – and began belting out popular rabble-rousers like ‘Fame! I Want to Live Forever’. A crowd gathered, mums and dads and kids in little fluorescent green haloes, handed out by the stewards. And at half-past seven, almost like magic, the first of four huge processions – from the west, south, north and east of the city – suddenly materialised in the square, bobbing, dancing, gleaming against the dark trees. There were the big floats of course: a gorgeous white reindeer, a giant image of the Prime Minister shoving a gunboat out to sea, a big Rabbie Burns contemplating a huge haggis with a knife still wobbling in its entrails. St Columbkille’s Primary School in Rutherglen excelled itself with a beautiful white Swan Lake float; and my personal favourite – a comment on the whole ‘city of culture’ idea – was a huge light sculpture of a reclining nude resting heavily on an arcaded couch, beneath which the labouring, straining forms of workers struggled to keep the structure in place.
But in a sense, the big set pieces were beside the point; because what was lovely, what was breathtaking, what reduced one or two cynical old observers to tears, was the children, thousand upon thousand of them pouring down West George Street and up Queen Street and down North Hanover Street, every one of them clutching a little lantern – not more than a couple of feet across, often less – skipping, running, singing, hanging on to teachers and mums and dads, sedulously keeping their little jam-jar candles alight. Say ‘Eight thousand primary-school kids with their own handmade lanterns’ quickly, and it doesn’t sound like much; see it, and you realise that it represents an almost overwhelming outpouring of small, stubborn creative impulses. There were beautifully made lanterns, and wee, battered, messy ones. There were boats and spaceships and churches and Mutant Hero Ninja Turtles, and lots of simple triangular lanterns with nothing but gorgeous, blobby abstract patterns on. In recognition of Glasgow’s strange crest – the tree, the bird, the bell, the fish – there were hundreds of brightly coloured fish, from huge sharks to tiny tiddlers; Lochgilphead Primary School brought a whole shoal, thirty-strong. There was a Noah’s Ark, with little matching pairs of lantern-bearers behind, each with an animal cut out and silhouetted against the surface of a simple white lamp; there were the kids from Milton Primary spelling out M-I-L-T-O-N in big glowing letters. There were rock groups and pipe bands and brass bands and steel bands and an extraordinary group of punk pipers, who writhed like Mick Jagger in their kilts. As the columns of light snaked out of George Square and along towards the High Street, toothless, well-oiled old punters emerged from a sawdust-and-spit pub called The Right Half, and cheered and danced on the pavement, to the kids’ delight. The city beamed from ear to ear, and one visitor, watching near me, muttered, ‘Croydon, eat your heart out; we could never get a feeling like this in a million years.’
Later, down at Glasgow Green, the ground was very squelchy and things went on a bit too long, as these events do. There were gorgeous forty-foot towers of lanterns, ice-cream vans, hot-dog stalls, and a big firework display; and Welfare State produced a kind of visual fantasia on the tree, bird, bell and fish theme, which ended with the tree burning down, and a gleaming white bird rising – rather limp-wristedly, on account of the rain – from the ashes. ‘Why’s that tree burning and falling to bits, Dad?’ asked a tot in the crowd. ‘Because it symbolises Glasgow, hen,’ answered the Dad, with feeling. But everybody laughed, because we knew there would be a phoenix later.
It is a fact universally acknowledged that Peter Brook’s theatrical work has a strong ‘international’ quality. His casting is multinational, with actors drawn from Europe, Africa and Asia. His base at the Bouffes du Nord in Paris bears the name ‘Centre International de Créations Théâtrales’; during his first two visits to Glasgow, with The Mahabharata and then with Carmen, I even felt that this intense cosmopolitanism was perhaps a weakness in an age when global homogenisation is commonplace, and a strong sense of local habitation, history and place harder to get.
But three productions in to Brook’s relationship with the Tramway – which he delighted his first-night audience by describing as ‘our dear new home’, when he appeared briefly on his own raked-sand stage to announce a small casting change – I’m beginning to see that Brook is much too great a director to let his work drift too far away from the specific, the concrete of human experience. His magnificent Tempest – for my money the strongest, clearest and most challenging production he has brought to Glasgow – seems to me to be rooted deeply in the experience of francophone Africa, and of its profound and subtle confrontation with European culture; also, therefore, rooted in the flavour of life in urban France today, where – in suburbs and arrondissements not five miles from Brook’s theatre – men and women from the Maghreb struggle to maintain their cultural identity and to come to terms with the power and sophistication of French metropolitan culture.
It’s as if Brook has discovered, in this tension, a potent reflection of the tension in Shakespeare’s play between modern and medieval cultures, the rational and the magical; as he acknowledges in a programme note, his African actors – particularly Sotigui Kouyaté, his commanding Prospero, and Bakary Sangaré’s big, light-footed, unforgettable Ariel – certainly bring a kind of ease, as well as a powerful vocal tradition of chants and songs, to the play’s invocations of magical and spiritual powers. There is of course nothing simplistic about the production, and its treatment of the play’s colonial theme. The island’s colonists, Prospero and Miranda, are black, as is the childlike Ariel; whereas the low-life characters Trinculo, Stephano and Caliban (a remarkable performance by David Bennent) career round the stage like a bunch of European skinheads petulantly determined to ‘get their own back’. But the sense of human dignity salvaged against the odds, and of African and European actors meeting as equals on the common ground of a great Western text that could have been used (as English generally was used) as a weapon of control and humiliation, gives a terrific richness and potency to the production’s exploration of the theme of freedom, which Brook sees as central to the play.
Because, of course, with a play of this stature, strong roots in a particular human situation or atmosphere are only the basis for something which soars out to touch every kind of life; and in the end – after a slow, reserved build-up under steady bright light on an almost aggressively empty stage – Brook brings his production to a magnificent understanding that real freedom, the freedom of the spirit, goes beyond not only the drunken licence of Caliban’s crew, and the brutal power-grabbing of Neapolitan politicians, but also beyond the terrific magical power Prospero has won by study and intellectual effort. In the end, in Kouyaté’s superb performance, this man with so much evident reason for pride stands before us a humble, almost naked petitioner, asking for the loving prayers of his fellow human beings, which alone can really free him. It is a magnificent theatrical moment in the simple, storytelling sense Brook loves to emphasise. But to me, it also seemed to say something important and timely about Europe and its culture at this moment of fine talk about European integration and the eastward extension of the European Community: that whatever else this continent does, it cannot afford to turn its back on the south, on the dignity of its people, the richness of its culture, and the profound economic and human links that bind their destiny to ours.