"l . r v THE WOLVES IN THE WALLS Tramway. Glasgow. run ended .00.
The idea of what constitutes home was one that the NTS kicked off with in its multi-venued extravaganza of February. In this, the effective debut of the NTS as a full scale company (in league with England's Improbable Theatre), Neil Gaiman's adaptation of he and Dave McKean’s celebrated children‘s book, director Vicky Featherstone revisits the notion. She and co-director/designer Julian Crouch have presented a piece of ravishing visual beauty, with eccentric and natty pop-up book effects and rich browns, reds and oranges to complement the dolls’ house-like home of the characters.
In it, we meet a child (Frances Thorburn) whose ill-auguries of lupine interlopers are ignored by tuba-playing Dad (lain Johnstone), jam~making mum (Cora Bissett) and Gameboy obsessed brother (Ryan Fletcher) to their mutual cost. The wolves do emerge through the walls and the family is dispossessed by Crouch's rangy, straggly rather chav-like creatures, operated by actors in vaguely Maoist uniforms. But families can fight back.
On the face of it, this child-friendly piece seems to subvert the conventional expectations of the bourgeois family, displaying the atomisation that leads to whole kinship groups ignoring each other for extended periods. The result of such self-absorbed lifestyles is dispossession, it seems to suggest. But the Wolves too, after they possess the house, are seen as a bunch of neds who fail its upkeep. As they break up its consumer goods they’re condemned for that most heinous of crimes in contemporary capitalist culture, a disrespect for property. In condemning both property culture and its reverse, the piece seems to lack a clear moral and ideological centre. For all that, though, Nick Powell‘s music is cheek-pinchineg charming, and there are some strong performances, especially from Johnstone and Bissett’s bewildered parents who both sing and move beautifully, making this a strong night out. Look out particularly for the plastic pig - its adventures are worth the admission alone. (Steve Cramer)
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.'.r‘i".en's pirtures' she made ll‘ the 7ft.» '5. raises poxrerful questions atzt iuf the way per ,ple are valued.
She did these incredible films about .'.';".at it is to he a '.'./oman.' he says. "(Ian ,'t )tl onl‘y he a Woman it you have tghildreh'? A lot of the Lung Ha's ‘.‘.()tltt}l‘. .vant to he in love and want to have children. and a lot of them are not allowed to because of their medication or because they've been :nstituti<inalisedf
Using the 'nieaty' musir: from the scores of Non. Voyager and Dark Moro/7., Good Sister Bad is set in the 19-10:; and upturns conventional ideas of good and bad, making political points as it goes.
'If love. sex and marriage are denied to a group of people and they're claiming it. that's very political.“ says Binnie. 'We have 3:3 people on stage who have a very different physicality to most of us. That should be part of the magic and intrigue of theatre — and too often it's not.' (Mark Fisher)
The Arches. Glasgow, Fri 21—Sat 22 Apr
l-oi this critic. the great (“SUCHCQ of the last decade to be made by the Edinburgh Fringe has been the Riot Group The power and preCiSion of their pig-r'f<~.iihan<‘e style. combining spoken and phySIcal language With memorable ""..’.l‘.tt‘., all amoini anied by metronomic inuSic. is a Sight to behold. whatever they 're dong, Part iii the secret is no doubt in the devismg process through ‘\.'.w'ti’til‘ th.s gimp stages the scripts of resident writer actor Adriano Shaplin. a? the Dr? Pa/arre. originally performed at the Fringe of str'.igg!(‘: between a father and daughter, both ancho's of ma teieuision nexus ser‘.:ces Loosely based on King Lear, it
the rtsixteniporan. 'l‘(:(l!£l mth a brutall‘> dispas8ionate eye. finding within it man; of the persona. and political ills of the Culture. This stOry of iter'sovia. t;(:lt;i‘,t’i an: Clér.‘(:l'. s.'.eeps trom 9 tt-style catastrophes to the nave." or i.»erso"ia sexuaf peccadilioes in its diagnose. and comes nigh. 'et‘omnit,-n;2eti. The Rio: Grout) will aiso be part of the Amhes SCratch Night on TNJs‘tld‘, 2C April. there new work from them as well as other groups ‘.-.':.: be tried Out lit process. For the Rioteers alone. it looks worth
Stage Whispers
I Whispers might be accused of labouring a point, yet he can‘t help but return to the smoking ban on Scottish stages. given perhaps the lengthiest debate on the Scottish professional theatre network, Scotnits, that he has ever witnessed. To reproduce any entry on this site verbatim might be to breach copyright, but suffice to say there is a great deal of passion within the professional theatre on this subject at the moment. Given that it is very difficult to believe, and actually impossible to prove, that a single cigarette lit on a large stage in an airy auditorium could produce a genuine health risk, it is hard not to conclude that that this isn't about health. Instead, the Scottish Executive is engaged in a Baudrillardian surrogation of reality. While we all know full well that smokers exist in great numbers in the real world, the Executive intends to oblige theatre artists to produce reality as it wishes it would be, not as it is. This enforced, surrogate reality, the world where no-one smokes, not even in Noel Coward’s plays, (in Present Laughter, pictured below, this image from the English tour was censored here) is one, it is hoped, where the ‘authorised’ reality replaces the real or the representation of the real. What’s happening in the Scottish Theatre, which remained, as far as Whispers knows, entirely unconsulted about this change that effects the profession so profoundly, is a tiny, and to most folk insignificant, version of a much larger pattern that has emerged over recent years between authority and ordinary people. Just as the prime minister can send us to war on the strength of what he says he believes, rather through empirical proof or any form of consultation, so we can now have legislation forced on us because it is ‘good for us’. That it is, by common consent, a very poor piece of legislation indeed because it has been presented without proper consultation, is a microcosmic example of a much mightier political abuse. 4"
13—27 Apr 2006 TNE LIST 85