FESTIVAL THEATRE | Reviews
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ON THE EXHALE Gun control drama is taut and timely ●●●●● AFTER TODAY Infamous TV interview revisited ●●●●●
SHACKLETON’S STOWAWAY Compelling look at Antarctic exploration ●●●●●
A lecturer in women's studies, played by Polly Frame, suffers the ultimate in survivor's guilt when her adored son Michael is killed in a high school shooting.
Numb with grief, railing at the 'nebulous motives' of the killings, she seeks some kind of closure, only to become seduced by the companionship of owning a gun herself. She takes matters into her own hands, tracking down a Republican senator. Freudian imagery abounds in Martin Zimmerman's monologue, where the squeeze of a trigger carries an erotic charge.
It's a fine character study in one woman's meltdown, the gamut of emotions beautifully portrayed by Frame, although it doesn't fully interrogate broader issues around gun ownership from either side of the debate. The breathing technique used prior to firing a gun becomes a kind of mantra to destruction, performed with an eerie, detached kind of calm. It's here that the play feels most effective, ramping up the tension. There are shades at times, too, of Lionel Shriver's
prose in the novel, We Need To Talk About Kevin. Not too original then, but it's a taut production which has a real emotional resonance. (Lorna Irvine) ■ Traverse, until 26 Aug, (not 20), times vary, £20.50 (£15.50).
Stage d’Or look back at December 1976, when Bill Grundy famously mismanages an interview on live TV with the Sex Pistols. This two-man play finds Grundy in his later years, verbally sparring with the young director of the regional lunchtime television show he is presenting. Between perfect takes for Close Up On Castles, Alex Donald’s Grundy spits out bile as he remembers that era-defining moment on the Today show. It’s an interesting focus for a theatre piece, and could have a lot to say about the punk movement, what relevance it has today, and what it was that rattled the old guard.
Sadly, this piece becomes too absorbed in trying to impersonate Grundy’s cadence and propensity for flowery language to shed any real light on these themes or to grasp at any larger messages. Constant references to Grundy’s reliance on alcohol and unrealistic self-image as a gentleman drinker are neither treated as comedy nor with the careful respect that alcoholism deserves.
Ultimately the play feels like a missed opportunity to explore the reality behind a man whose whole life and work became synonymous with the very thing he hated. (Sean Greenhorn) ■ PQA Venues @ Riddle’s Court, until 27 Aug (not 15, 21), 3pm, £10–£12.50 (£7.50–£10).
In 1914, Ernest Shackleton and a crew of 28 men set sail aboard the ship Endurance, with the intention of making the first land crossing of the Antarctic. Though they ultimately failed in their ambition after becoming locked in the pack ice and stranded for more than a year, the expedition – as well as the figure of Shackleton – has been lauded throughout history as an epic feat of survival. Shackleton’s Stowaway is faithful to this narrative,
but refracts it through the lens of the relationship between Shackleton and Perce Blackborow, the 18-year-old Welshman who stowed away on the expedition. Craig Poole is delightful as the starry-eyed Blackborow: he adores Shackleton, but his hero worship is tested when the Endurance is destroyed.
Carl Thompson cuts an imposing figure as Shackleton. With only a black backdrop and a projected map for stage dressing, Shackleton’s booming voice describing with poetic awe the drama and violence of their surroundings is genuinely affecting. Despite retreading familiar ground, Shackleton’s Stowaway proves that the narratives from the heroic age of Antarctic exploration still make for compelling stuff. (Deborah Chu) ■ theSpace @ Surgeons Hall, until 25 Aug (not 19), £9–£10 (£7–£8).
A FORTUNATE MAN Radical deconstruction of classic book about the medical profession ●●●●●
Doctors are pillars of our society, and it’s only natural that we should speculate about the how and why of the manner in which they operate on us. Journalist John Berger and photographer Jean Mohr collaborated in 1967 to create the book A Fortunate Man, an essay with photographs that reflected six weeks following the routines of a country doctor, John Sassal. It’s since become a classic within and without the medical profession, and gained an inadvertent mystique some years later when Sassal shot himself. Created by New Perspectives theatre company, A
Fortunate Man is an exploration of the original text from this dark hindsight, performed by Matthew Brown and Hayley Doherty in the clinical environs of one of Summerhall’s authentic medical lecture theatres.
Brown and Doherty act out scenes from the book under the direction of Michael Pinchbeck, but this isn’t a lecture, more of a deconstruction – if not an explosion – of the text. The book remains intact in bookshops; this is a devised theatre piece, and some may find New Perspectives’s take on the material to be destructive or even self-indulgent. It’s certainly radical, with several scenes drowning each other out in a manner than might leave purists yearning for the clarity of the original.
This kind of meditation on a text can and should be divisive; New Perspectives and Pinchbeck perhaps overdo the technique at times, but the result is a stimulating and sometimes compelling piece of theatre, worth seeing whether you’ve read the original book or not. (Eddie Harrison) ■ Summerhall, until Aug 26 (not 20), 4.30pm, £10.
88 THE LIST FESTIVAL 15–27 Aug 2018