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PREVIEW NEW WORK ENQUIRER The Hub, Pacific Quay, Glasgow, Thu 26 Apr–Sat 12 May. Booking via Citizens Theatre
Into the pristine, empty top floor of the Hub, a media office block between the Clyde, Film City and the BBC, has come the clutter of a newspaper office. The mismatched chairs, the cardboard coffee trays, the piles of paper are all present and correct. Enquirer, National Theatre of Scotland’s response to the crisis facing the British press, will be staged among these telephone cables and grubby keyboards.
‘I have,’ says co-director John Tiffany, ‘a deep love of print journalism. I’ve grown up with journalists and a lot them are turning round and saying what now? It’s not just about how they pay the mortgage. It’s a collective sense of shame about what has happened.’ What has happened is the long-term structural changes to
the print media caused by digital technology and the crashing horror of the phone hacking scandal. To tackle both, and to ‘chronicle and acknowledge the industry as it disappears,’ Tiffany and Vicky Featherstone, the other creative director of NTS, commissioned three journalists from different backgrounds to interview their colleagues and peers. Senior Guardianista Deborah Orr, style writer Paul Flynn and Herald stalwart Ruth Wishart between them talked to 41 journalists about their start in the industry, their hopes, dreams and visions for the future. Trenchant columnists, ancient old timers with ink in their veins, senior editors in Scotland, London and overseas have all contributed.
From this raw data Tiffany and Featherstone have cut and pasted – they are now impressively fluent in newspaperspeak – a show that poses more questions than answers. A cast including Maureen Beattie, John Bett and Billy Boyd will jump in and out of what Tiffany describes as a ‘frenetic’ piece, roughly structured round a newspaper’s day. ‘We have not dramatised it at all,’ he says. ‘It’s journalists on journalism. You are fascinating people.’ (Anna Burnside)
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REVIEW NEW PLAY COULD YOU PLEASE LOOK INTO THE CAMERA Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh, until Sat 28 Apr. Seen at Oran Mor, Glasgow, Mon 16 Apr ●●●●●
Great theatre will, at some point, emerge from the Arab Spring. This is not it. As rough and raw as a piece about Syria would have to be in the face of unfolding events, Mohammed Al Attar’s patchwork of real people’s experiences of detention is also clunky, unengaging and under-rehearsed. Three characters, amalgamations of various dissidents interviewed by the playwright, go to Noura’s flat for her to record their stories. Only one, Karim, the young hothead protestor, convinces in any way. Umar Ahmed is charismatic and believable, throwing back vodka, arranging his hair in the lens before filming commences, complaining about his father. The other two have to pack so much procedural into their monologues that there is no room for anything else. Alia Alzougbi’s Noura is jumpy and unconvincing, failing to connect either with the people she is shooting or the audience. The staging makes clever use of the film trope and, at the end, when Noura is herself incarcerated and appears on a TV screen, it’s the only impressive part of her performance. (Anna Burnside)
REVIEW BLACK COMEDY THE LIEUTENANT OF INISHMORE Royal Lyceum, Edinburgh, until Sat 12 May ●●●●● REVIEW DANCE A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE Touring Scotland until Sat 12 May. Seen at Edinburgh Festival Theatre, Fri 20 Apr ●●●●●
A comedy about republicanism, terrorists, and dead cats that’s more fun than it sounds, The Lieutenant of Inishmore displays Martin McDonagh’s talent for harnessing the comic potential in those peculiarly Irish turns of phrase. Many of the play’s best moments are in the rapid exchanges of petty bickering amongst the rather clichéd cast of small- town layabouts, splinter groups and splinter groups who’ve splintered from the splinter groups.
But the story – about crazed one-man terrorist faction ‘Mad Padraig’ brought rushing home by the news that his cat is poorly – follows a predictable arc. Liam Brennan, Mark Prendergast and Jamie Quinn make a great comic trio of rival would-be freedom fighters, waylaid by bickering about ‘the principle of the thing’, but at this early stage in the run the production is let down by some roughness around the edges when it comes to timing and set changes. And while the snappy dialogue ensures it rarely drags, the ending could helpfully have come a lot sooner and with less labouring of the point that much nationalism and fighting is as nonsensical as fighting over spilt cat brains. (Laura Ennor)
Early on in Scottish Ballet’s audacious adaptation of Streetcar, it hits home just how persuasively Tennessee Williams’ play has been adapted for non- verbal storytelling. Director Nancy Meckler and choreographer Annabelle Lopez Ochoa have pared back the scenario to a series of set pieces, rendering the power struggle between faded Southern belle Blanche DuBois (beautifully performed by Eve Mutso) and her brutish brother-in- law Stanley Kowalski (a sensuous Tama Barry) even more powerfully than the iconic 1951 film. Their violent final showdown is particularly disturbing, while the opening up of Blanche’s backstory to reveal the tragic suicide of her young husband and the addition of a testosterone-fuelled scene in a bowling alley further accentuate our understanding of the protagonists’ motivations. Apart from one striking sequence in which Blanche begins her descent into fantasy there’s very little use of classical ballet technique. Rather, Ochoa’s much freer range of movement complements Peter Salem’s jazz-infused score, to create a dynamic, exhilarating and edgy production. (Allan Radcliffe)
26 Apr–24 May 2012 THE LIST 109