www.list.co.uk/theatre
REVIEW NEW PLAY EVERY ONE Royal Lyceum, Edinburgh, until Sat 3 Apr ●●●●●
‘The management must be quaking in their boots!’ quips one of the characters as an aside early on in this original work by Jo Clifford. Certainly, the piece is a brave undertaking for both theatre and playwright: a lyrical but still close to the knuckle portrayal of a sudden death and its aftermath based on the playwright’s own, still raw, experience of loss.
Clifford gets around our innate
squeamishness about the subject matter with a disarming opening in which the characters – five members of a family – face the audience and nervously introduce themselves. It is their believable ordinariness that makes what happens next such a jolt: mother Mary (a warm, dynamic performance from Kathryn Howden) drops dead one morning while doing the ironing. It’s as shocking for the audience as it is for the surviving family members that there is to be no second chance for Mary: her life is over, she’s dead and that’s that. Clifford reveals admirable ambition in
the second part of the play, opening out the discussion to meditate on everything from global warming to the Holocaust. The parallels between this small, but crucial death and destruction on a grand scale are clear, but gradually the play loses its gentle power even becoming rather hectoring at points, and only resonates again when we return to the family and their individual attempts to live through their grief. (Allan Radcliffe)
Theatre
PREVIEW CLOWN SHOW SICK Tron Theatre, Glasgow, Wed 31–Sat 3 Apr, then touring
The glamorised version of hospital life so familiar from TV drama is fairly obviously far removed from reality, but what that reality is, few of us actually know until we or a loved one are suddenly forced to spend time being treated in a hospital. Theatre Modo director Martin Danziger was inspired by time spent undergoing treatment for cancer in 2007 to explore the unexpected absurdity of hospitalisation in a new one-woman clown show, Sick, which will play to audiences in theatres and hospital wards alike in the coming months.
‘I found it quite difficult to talk about at the time,’ explains Danziger, ‘just because you don’t know which bits are commonly shared and which bits are the bits that are weird. Also, when you’re in hospital, you don’t have that many people to ask advice from. And the doctors and the nurses, I think they forget sometimes about the things that you won’t have a clue about – whether that’s the daily injection that they give you to stop your blood clotting, or even which way around
your hospital gown goes, which I’ve certainly seen fellow patients fail to get right.’
Working with patient groups to draw together a range of authentic shared and ‘weird’ experiences, Danziger and clown Suzie Ferguson have concocted a show aiming to expose the often absurd, often awkward, secret life of the patient. ‘We haven’t got an axe to grind against the NHS and it’s not a big “woe is me, I’m in hospital” piece at all – it’s much more about that experience and so I think clowning very early on became an obvious way of doing it.’
Using authentic hospital furniture from the now closed Queen Mother’s Maternity Hospital at Yorkhill and a musical score full of the bleeps and mysterious background sounds of the ward and mixing the madcap (a dance routine with a drip stand) with the more disconcerting or frightening, Danziger hopes that the show will be a catalyst for more frank discussion of what goes on when we get ill: ‘Sickness happens to most of us at some point, so finding a way of talking about that more openly can only be a good thing.’ (Laura Ennor)
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PREVIEW NEW WORK TONIGHT DAVID IRELAND WILL LECTURE, BOX & DANCE BY SANDY GRIERSON Oran Mor, Glasgow, Mon 5–Sat 10 Apr
Perhaps the most notable aspect of the new company Greyscale is the astonishing array of young talent involved. Moreover, the contributing actors, directors and writers are all committed to erasing the boundaries around their job descriptions, with collaboration bringing creative contributions from unexpected angles.
The company won’t be sued under the Trades Descriptions Act for this piece: actor David Ireland will indeed be carrying out all the activities in the title, partly in response to fellow actor and author Sandy Grierson’s fascination with the legendary cult figure Arthur Cravan. This shadowy, intriguing man, a critic, boxer and worldwide adventurer was an eccentric shaggy dog story in human form, the truths and lies of his life forming a bizarre kind of cipher about modern living, the facts and fictions of which are often unfathomably interlinked. In the play Ireland claims to be Cravan’s descendant and engages in a picaresque narrative of his own. The nature of the story tells us much about this new company’s techniques.
‘This character’s impossible to get a handle on – which is what’s so amazing
about seeing David coming to terms with him,’ Grierson says. ‘I think though that all this embodies an idea about stories – we see life as a single line, a progressive story where we travel along chronologically on a journey, learning things along the way. Actually, I think the truth is way more complex than that. Arthur Cravan’s inability to be just one person, embody one personality, is a far more common thing than we think.’ (Steve Cramer)
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C V E J R T M D A M L E S
1–15 Apr 2010 THE LIST 83