Theatre
PREVIEWE;Xl’l RIMlNlAl “.".()l«‘l< YEAR OF THE HORSE Tron Theatre, Glasgow, Thu 19-Sat 28 Feb
In January 2007, Resonance FM called up Tam Dean Burn, who produced occasional live plays for them, looking for a new piece. He promised them he’d think about it, then picked up a newspaper. Front page news was the death - then presumed to be a suicide pact, later revealed as the murder and suicide - of Mandy Williamson and her husband Harry Horse (real name Richard Home), the award-winning children’s author and political cartoonist for the Sunday Herald.
‘l was really shocked by the news, really shaken,’ says Burn. ‘That’s when I realised how his cartoons had affected me. I got back on to Resonance immediately and said I’d like to put together a memorial.’ That short radio play has grown into Year of the Horse, a theatrical piece, structured around the 52 cartoons Horse published in the year leading up to his death, usually in response to the Bush/Blair ‘special relationship’. Burn asked Keith Mclvor, better known as Optimo’s Twitch, to create a soundtrack. ‘I saw on the Optimo website
82 THE LIST 19 Fet\~5 Mar 2009
that Keith had written an obituary for him, that he’d been moved by his work too.‘
Where other political cartoonists depicted Bush as a near-Ioveable chimpanzee, Horse’s images don’t shrink from the horror he felt these men represented: Blair is a puppet worked by demons, Bush a gnarled, poisonous tree trailing skeletons. The metaphors are lurid, but they’re beautiful, too, the bleakness of the imagery increasing in intensity as the year progresses. Knowing what we now do about Horse’s mental state in the months leading up to the deaths, it’s tempting to draw conclusions, but Burn’s piece stays resolutely away from sensationalist editorialising.
‘The text in Year of the Horse was all written by Harry Horse himself,’ he explains. ‘His editor had asked him to add some text, so he wrote poems to accompany each week’s cartoon. He was able to come up with these amazing images, but also express himself and the way he felt about what was going on politically that week, through verse, and these things that had such an impact on everyone who read them: that's what I wanted to celebrate.’ (Kirstin lnnes)
REVIEW NATURALISTIC DRAMA DEFENDER OF THE FAITH
PREVIEW 50“ Q L“
THE MYSTERY OF IRMA VEP
Royal Lyceum Theatre. Edinburgh. Fri 20 Feb—Sat 14 Mar
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Tron Theatre, Glasgow, until Sat 28 Feb 000
The problems inherent in Andy Arnold's new production are alrnca all in the writing. Which is strange. because Stuart Carolan's debut script. .yritterl lll 20,4. won awards and a transfer to Broadway on its first run
It's not that Carolan's story of escalating tenSion between a father and so! fighting in a rural. Border—b0und sect of the UVF. isn't compelling or original, Where he falls down is the exeCution: moments of te SIOH are dagged up try exposmon-heaw dialogue. there's a fair bit of sub-Tarantino rifting .‘/.'l",ll feels M"; a yOunger man's approximation of how tough guys talk to each other. and the shock and punch of a perfectly-assembled climax :s blunted lnl'riediatel/ afterwards by a gauche. JU‘Jefllle closmg speech.
The production itself is not Without merit. In deference to his .vegrty subject matter. Arnold pares back the direction so that the scenes unfold with often u HF}! realism. This starkness. buoyed by a set almost overbearingly cluttered .‘Jitlt naturalistic detail. is necessahy in order for us to fully apprecrate the horror of the one climactic moment of Violence the play throws up. The acting is also excellent: as Thomas. the son on whose doubt of his father the play pivots. Martin McCormick turns in an emotionally weighty performance. With strong support from Laurie Ventry as a conflicted farm worker. With less reverence and some JUdlClOUS cutting of the script. this could be a first-class production. (Kirstin lnnes)
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