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REVIEW ROMCOM WITH soncs MIDSUMMER
Traverse, Edinburgh, until Sat 15 Nov 0000
Ah, the romcom: an often-derided form in cinema. easily discarded as lightweight. In the decidedly heavyweight world of the theatre. it's unmentionab/e. Sometimes. though, it's necessary to make art out of the sheer joy to be found in life and falling in love. and that's what David Greig's lovely little two-hander does. with all the classy poise and exuberant bounce of a really good pop song.
One wet weekend. Helena and Bob. both 35 and unhappy. meet. drink. screw. run around Edinburgh and fall in love. and. thanks to two sparkly. charismatic performances from Cora Bissett and Matthew Pidgeon. somehow manage to reinvigorate the tired old subject matter of the mid-30s crisis.
Greig’s script zips around the city. never content to stick to a straight format when it could bubble off into parodies of movies or morning television shows. or a mock-conference inside a character's head. using the audiences as delegates. Then there are Gordon 'ballboy' lvlcintyre's songs — lovelorn and ruelul and gorgeous and witty. popping up to accentuate rather than further the narrative.
The only moment that rings false is a shonky sub-plot involving a local gangster. and even then it's just because Pidgeon's Bob is too darn likeable to be convincing as even a crap petty criminal. Midsummer is utter. joyful pleasure. and if you don't come out smitten. you just aren't my sort of person. (Kirstin lnnes)
REVIEW PARODY
OTTEB PIE
Seen at Brunton Theatre, Musselburgh. Touring throughout Scotland until Sat 6 Dec 00
“Biggest load of crap I‘ve seen in my life . . .' muttered one punter. padding past me halfway through the show. He wasn't the only early departures from the Brunton Theatre. yet I couldn't help feeling that a harsh judgement had been made. While Fish and Game's peculiar. fringe revue-style burlesque of Grassic Gibbons' Sunset Song. topped and tailed by semi- related sketches. seems desperately disjointed in places. there's a certain endearing comic energy to its performances. including a series of meta-theatrical turns. where scenes are done as ceilidhs and discos. and interrupted by debates about the quality of the actors' accents.
The problem is not a lack of vigour. but of anything coherent to say. with the result that the piece comes across as an un-thought-through outburst of undergraduate energy. Early on. two sternly Presbyterian preachers rail against individualism and consumerism, perhaps to larnpoon the morals of modern society. while the recurrent theme of apocalypse is presumably there to remind us that we might as well indulge in the hedonism condemned. But one can't help but feel that the time for Bacchanalian excess might have passed. and that Robert Walton‘s production atop Claire Halloran's kitsch tartan dancefloor has misjudged the mood of the moment. (Steve Cramer)
REVIEW MODERN CLASSIC
4.48 PSYCHOSIS
Seen at Cumbernauld Theatre. At Tramway, Glasgow, until Sat 15 Nov 0000
It doesn't seem right to say you have enjoyed Sarah Kane’s final play. Written not long before her suicide in 1999 and staged posthumously, it is a poetic evocation of the mind of someone in the depths of clinical depression. There are flashes of dark humour if you care to look - and this production by Adrian Osmond’s SweetScar defiantly doesn’t - but the overriding mood is one of helpless despair. A first- date show it is not.
For these reasons, audiences struggle to find an appropriate response. Even after a performance with the startling intensity of Magdalena Cielecka in the TR Warszawa production at this year’s Edinburgh International Festival, the idea of applauding seemed in bad taste. When I saw that show in Poland, some people had started leaving before the rest of us summoned up the strength to clap.
And on the night I saw Osmond’s production there was no applause at all, not only because actor Keith
Theatre
Macpherson had reached a sorry end in a watery grave and wasn’t going to come back (I’m not giving anything away to say 4.48 Psychosis ends badly). It was also because of the show’s novel presentation. It begins in absolute darkness - not even an exit sign to help you orientate — and getting to your seat requires the guidance of an usher wearing night- vision goggles. You‘re well into the performance before you figure out where everyone else is sitting and for a while you’re not even sure if there’s a stage. As a consequence, you experience this 4.48 Psychosis not as a collective, but as an individual unsettled by sensory depravation. In one way that encourages you to identify with Macpherson’s mental disorientation, to empathise with this tormented figure in the gloomiest of rooms. But in another way, Osmond distances you from the actor by playing the script as a pre-recorded collage of voices, like an interior conversation rattling away in the man’s head. The lack of applause is due to a sense of social alienation that matches the psychiatric dissociation taking place on stage. It is a very lonely experience. You won’t enjoy it, but you should see it. (Mark Fisher)
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