Theatre
The total guide to total theatre
l NEW PLAY
GAG-ARIN WAY
Traverse Theatre, 4-25 Aug, times vary.
It must have occurred to most of us by now that voting gives us a choice between two parties with identical policies. Whichever bunch of crooks you put into office to pull the dummy levers of power, while the real power is exercised by multinationals, will make little difference to your life. Some folk, seen venting their understandable anger on the streets of cities at various GB summits have taken up the fight through disparate alternative political groupings, but what has happened to socialism, the single, unifying power which opposed these gigantic capitalist leviathans in the past?
A new black comedy about this issue represents a first and last simultaneously. Gregory Burke, an unheard of Dunfermline writer, has been given the unusual honour of a first full-scale production at the Traverse in the hothouse atmosphere of the Fringe. This will also be the last production at the Traverse by John Tiffany, the widely respected director (Passing Places, Perfect Days) whose abundant talents will be missed when he shifts to Paines Plough in September.
The title of the play hints at its subject matter. There is in fact a street in Dunfermline named after the great Soviet cosmonaut, for reasons Burke is quick to explain. ‘Fife was the only place in the UK to elect a communist Member of Parliament,’ he says. ‘There was a great tradition of working-class socialism there, until recently. The play talks about how someone of my generation seems to have grown up apolitical, when people just a generation older believed in and were active in something bigger.’
This play involves a plan by a group of factory workers to abduct a prominent executive from the multinational which plans to make them redundant, but Tiffany contends that the play isn’t political in a
Fin de hammer and sickle
conventional sense: ‘I don’t believe all that stuff about theatre and writing being political. No one is going to march out of this play and have a riot; it’s self-deluding to think they will. Theatre is about having a conversation with people, a discourse.’
‘But it's going to be funny, I hope,’ says Burke, dispelling my increasing feeling that we’re in for a night of earnest existential angst, tempered with some observations about monopoly capitalism. ‘There’s a kind of aggressive apathy to people from my generation, and a lot about lifestyle choice, rather than political choice, because there is no choice politically.’ (Steve Cramer)
vary
Traverse Theatre, 5-25 Aug, times
BLACK COMEDY start . WIPING MY MOTHER’S ' . . . Ans: It also helped inspire his latest black
comedy. He'd been toying for ages with the idea of an embarrassing
reunion between two ex-Iovers; in this
dlth Mecarthur is the bottom
lain Heggie's not as young as he was. And his realisation of such is all for the good. First off, it has made him a lot more prolific. Time was when you'd have to wait forever for a new Heggie play and. although Wiping My Mother's Arse is his first original drama to reach the stage since 1995's An Experienced Woman Gives Advice. he's been non-stop with rewrites and translations from The King of Scotland (back at the Assembly Rooms. 3—19 Aug) to a brilliant Marivaux rewrite given a rehearsed reading at Glasgow's Tron earlier this year, not to mention his much praised directorial debut with the Scottish premiere of The Beauty Queen of Leenane in May.
‘When your parents die. it makes you reassess like mad.’ says Heggie. ‘You're suddenly aware you're next. It makes you get your finger out, for a
case. a man who doesn't want his ex- b0yfriend to know abdut his new girlfriend. What he needed was a context for the story to happen. ‘I got it from the illness and death of my mother in the last five years,‘ he says. ‘That dramatic situation was about what responsibility you have to people losing their powers who have always looked after you.‘
The dramatic twist now is that the mother. played by Edith Macarthur in Philip Howard's production, is being cared for by her son's ex-Iover. There is no escaping the confrontation. Which is just how Heggie. a keen student of dramatic structure. likes it. ‘The whole play is set in a nursing home so it's all lain Heggie back to his habits; entrances and exits, one location.’
And scurrilously funny to boot, we trust. (Mark Fisher)
Opera Galactlca Now, if you thought you needed a tuxedo for the opera. think again. This mad. campy parody of the Star Wars films is as funny and accessible as you like. along with the great voices. Gateway Theatre, 5—27 Aug, 7pm.
Oegarin Way See preview (left). Traverse Theatre, 4—25 Aug, times vary.
Wiping My Mother's Arse See preview (left). Traverse Theatre, 5-25 Aug, times vary. Mlsslng Reel Toby Jones' performs, unaided but for a foley artist, the story of his removal from the final cut of Notting Hill. A piece of enthralling theatrical storytelling, complete with movement. Traverse Theatre, 2—25 Aug, times vary. Resident Allen Bette Bourne performs the part of his friend Quentin Crisp in Tim Fountain's acclaimed New York hit. Not so
'much an audience with, as an
evening in a seedy room with the campmeister. See feature, page 18.
Tiny Dynamlte Abi Morgan's play about loss and buried grief is performed by a combination of some of the best companies in the UK. With influences ranging from new writers' theatre to physical theatre, this should prove a startling, eclectic mix. See feature page 19. Ferdydurke The Kantor inspired Teatr Provisorium performs Witold Gombrowicz's classic Polish novel, banned in its own time for its homoerotic content. This physical theatre production should bring the piece to life. Komedia St Stephen 's,
2- 13 Aug
Medea Liz Lochhead's magnificent adaptation of Euripedes returns after much acclaim last year. Maureen Beattie will reprise her role as the matricidal mother. Assembly Rooms, 6-25 Aug.
Bedbound lrish wiz kid Enda Walsh, of Disco Pigs, returns with this new piece, which explores a dysfunctional parent/child relationship, and subverts the Irish storytelling tradition. Traverse Theatre, 3-12 Aug.
2-9 Aug 2001 THE LIST 47