list.co.uk/festival Reviews | FESTIVAL THEATRE
I
N E E R B E M A J © O T O H P
TRANS SCRIPTS An unflinching look at transgender women ●●●●●
BRUCE Alvin Sputnik creators return with space-themed parody ●●●●● TRAINSPOTTING Frustrating immersive underground show ●●●●●
Paul Lucas' unflinching, compassionate play is based on five trans women and one trans man, all from different backgrounds. Using verbatim stories, the cisgender and trans cast of six tackle a panoply of voices from the global community. Travelling from classroom to nightclub, via the surgery for gender reassignment, myths are dispelled. They claim Stonewall's cause was co-opted by white gay men, and sexual preference isn't fixed. After all, the truth is as complex as each individual's testimony. Everyone is superb, swapping roles or acting
as emotional buffers to one other, particularly the serene Bianca Leigh as Tatiana, Calpernia Addams as Sandra and Rebecca Root as damaged Eden, whose parental issues causes eruptions of unfocused fury. It's also hilarious and riotous, with lip-synching, bawdy jokes and the opportunity for some audience members to feel how authentic silicone breasts are.
Ultimately, emerging from stories of 'treatment systems', beatings, day-to-day verbal and physical abuse is a triumphant, undeterred spirit. It's just a little long – a small edit would give it more punch – but a really insightful and often beautiful journey into misunderstood, marginalised lives. (Lorna Irvine) ■ Pleasance Courtyard, 556 6550, until 31 Aug, 3pm, £7.50–£10 (£6.50–£9).
Before donning their masks for their performance, Tim Watts and Wyatt Nixon-Lloyd hang out on stage as the audience file in, clad in morph suits but with their faces on show. That’s important – it reminds the audience that the hour of puppetry that follows isn’t just a dreamy, magical sequence, however much it feels like one. These are real people performing with exquisite skill and perfect comic timing, and the triumph that is Bruce is due completely to their hard work.
Audiences will know the pair from 2011’s The Adventures of Alvin Sputnik and 2013’s It’s Dark Outside. Bruce shares a little more of Sputnik’s aesthetic, evoking cinematic influences to create an irresistibly charming tale in which every character is portrayed by an oversize sponge with eyes. We start off in space as Bruce is trying to make it back to Earth, and the story that follows is a jigsaw puzzle of parody Hollywood blockbuster storylines, executed at such breakneck speed that it really does come across like an action movie. And when the story feels a little muddled in the middle – and it does – stick with it, because it all comes together in a blissful finale. (Yasmin Sulaiman) ■ Underbelly Cowgate, 0844 545 8252, until 30 Aug, 3.15pm, £11.50–£12.50 (£10.50–£11.50).
In Your Face and King Head Theatre’s Trainspotting is a heady cocktail: part Irvine Welsh’s 1993 cult novel, part Danny Boyle’s 1996 iconic film adaptation, it takes place within a suitably atmospheric setting.The party has already started as the audience enters, armed only with a glow stick against the blaring dance music and strobe lighting. The performers play their in-the-round audience well, particularly during monologues.
Much like the work that inspired it, Trainspotting openly flaunts its intention to shock and the gasps and shrieks of revulsion that greet its stagecraft are often well earned. But the shocks provide diminishing returns after the bold opening gambit.
For all its frenetic energy and gallus patter, a reliance on narration within key scenes limits the potential for emotional moments to unfold organically between the talented nine-strong ensemble cast. Climactic scenes revolving around Greg Esplin’s Tommy come close to finding an emotional path into the characters, but by this point more time has been spent on satisfyingly black-humoured vignettes than on setting up the emotional arc of the piece. (Elliot Roberts) ■ Assembly George Square, 623 3030, until 31 Aug (not 25), 6pm & 8.30pm (10.45pm, Thu–Sat), £13–£15 (£11–£13).
TOMORROW Chilling and beautiful experimental study of dementia and care work ●●●●●
On a piece of paper handed to the audience as they file in, Glasgow’s Vanishing Point explain that they wanted, ‘to get beneath someone’s skin in a visceral rather than intellectual way’. It’s safe to say they have. This experimental study of dementia and care work is a hardcore, unflinching look at ageing and end-of-life care, delivered like a sucker punch to the heart.
After an intense opening scene, there are nightmarish nods to
Jean-Paul Sartre’s 1940s play No Exit, and John Frankenheimer’s terrifying 1960s sci-fi film, Seconds. George, a young and earnest man, hurrying to meet his newborn daughter in hospital, is grabbed and forced into a disorientating holding pen. A cosseted purgatory, where care workers coo at him in cloyingly patronising tones (‘I’ll need you to calm down for me’), they strip him naked and force a rubbery mask over his head – wrinkled and bald – trapping him underneath a grotesque flash-forward to his frail, elderly self. What follows is an uncomfortable and saddening swirl; care workers lead infantile singsongs, patients get aggressive, pee themselves, repeat questions, and all the while, past and present realities blur and churn around them.
Just as the carers rely on jokes to cope with the work, Matthew
Lenton’s sparse script allows flashes of gallows humour to cut through the gloom. At one point, a silent old man nonchalantly sketches explicit drawings of another patient, and another brandishes his zimmer frame like a weapon. With its casually crushing dialogue, and skilful sensory
manipulation, Tomorrow is chilling and beautiful, and as much an abstract and tortured study of what it means to be ‘in the land of the living’ as it is the land of the dying. (Claire Sawers) ■ Traverse, 228 1404, until 30 Aug (not 24), times vary, £20 (£15).
20–31 Aug 2015 THE LIST FESTIVAL 77
I
K C S S E M L A D N E K © O T O H P
I
C V O L D L O B A L E A H M © O T O H P
I