THEATRE | Previews
OUTDOOR SHAKESPEARE OTHELLO Botanic Gardens, Glasgow, Wed 19 Jun–Sat 6 Jul
Bard in the Botanics first tackled Othello six years ago. But for Gordon Barr, artistic director of Glasgow’s annual outdoor Shakespeare programme, the depth found in the Bard’s classic tragedy, in which a Moorish general in Venice is driven to murderous jealousy by his villainous advisor, made revisiting it inevitable. ‘Othello always felt like one of those plays that I wanted to have another crack at,’ Barr explains. ‘It’s a fascinating play, and it’s a difficult play to get hold of and try and understand the process that Iago takes Othello on. It’s fascinating for a director to follow that journey.’
This year’s season also includes a modern take on Julius Caesar (‘it’s kind of Shakespeare meets Borgen’) and Much Ado About Nothing, in which the central lovers Benedick and Beatrice become contemporary male partners Benedick and Bertram.
Unusually for Bard in the Botanics, Othello will retain its
original Shakespearean setting. ‘It’s something a little different for me,’ Barr laughs. ‘I’ve been artistic director here for ten years and never done a piece in Elizabethan dress. So, oddly, the most radical thing I could do with the play was to take it back to its original period.’ (Yasmin Sulaiman)
LIVE ART/CABARET ANATOMY #5: NO! ANYTHING BUT THAT! Summerhall, Edinburgh, Fri Jun 14
Anatomy, Edinburgh’s quarterly contemporary performance event, returns for a fifth night. This time, the intention is to provoke its audience into screaming out, ‘No! Anything but THAT!’ Based in the old anatomy lecture theatre at Summerhall, the night resurrects the traditions of music hall while using the best in live art and the most unusual performances the organisers can find. ‘We are not trying to beat the audience into submission,’
co-curator Harry Giles insists. ‘What we want to do is surprise people and take them into places that they weren’t expecting to go. This looks at the many different things that might make them say: “anything but that!” So we have got some artistic exploration of failure. We have got things that are transgressive, but we are also trying to entertain and love the audience, which might be quite surprising as well.’ With circus, bingo, electronic noise music, dance and
burlesque, the night conforms closely to Giles’ stated aim of not just bringing art forms together, but also creating an arena where audiences for different genres can meet each other. The acts will not all be of the shock-horror variety, Giles promises, adding that there will be plenty of ‘glorious surprises’ in an evening that aims to be as wild and celebratory as possible. (Thom Dibdin)
MUSICAL BLOOD BROTHERS Edinburgh Playhouse, Mon 24–Sat 29 Jun
Compare actor Sean Jones’ 14-year association with the hugely successful touring musical Blood Brothers to a marriage, and he gently replies that it actually is. He met his wife (actress Tracy Spencer), while working on the show, where he plays Mickey, one of the estranged twins of the title, and she is Mrs Lyons, the well-to-do adoptive mother of his brother Edward. For much of the year, the pair live on the road with their young daughter, but he says the experience is, ‘rather lovely. The role’s got everything for an actor to get their teeth into. I’d be hard-pushed to find one that suited me more.’
Even after nearly a decade and a half, Jones is at a loss to explain the huge and enduring success of Willy Russell’s musical, but he has his theories. ‘The structure is great,’ he says. ‘It’s such a tightly-woven piece of writing to essentially get 40 years of people’s lives into a three-hour musical. There’s something about the characters that an audience just warms to, such as the archetypal strong mother: we love that in this country, don’t we? And the question of class is a big thing, of course, and the whole issue of nature versus nurture. It’s got it all, alongside some nice little tunes and funny moments.’ (David Pollock)
POP MUSICAL CANNIBAL WOMEN OF MARS Tron Theatre, Glasgow, Fri 5–Sat 20 Jul
‘I went to see Avenue Q about five years ago and thought that there is bound to be more space for stuff like this: a musical for people who don’t go to musicals,’ says Mick Cooke, member of Belle and Sebastian, BAFTA-winning composer and the musical maverick who provides songs for Cannibal Women of Mars. As the Tron’s late season production, Cannibal Women of Mars is a radical departure from typical musical theatre. The plot follows the misadventures of two young men as they escape to the Red Planet in the hope of finding pleasures prohibited on a brutal Earth. ‘It’s 100 years in the future, over-population is a problem so the lower classes aren’t allowed to breed,’
explains Gordon Davidson, Cooke’s long time collaborator and co-author of the show’s book. ‘If you are caught trying to breed, that’s it: castration. Which is the motivation for our characters to go to Mars.’ In classic science fiction style, however, the young men – whom Cooke describes as having ‘the sort of naivety familiar from The Inbetweeners’ – discover that ‘there are worse things than having your scrotum removed’. Cooke, meanwhile, takes advantage of the fantastic scope of the story to explore a range of musical styles, from a sea shanty to some Latin swing. Having a live band on stage also gives the songs a continuity of sound despite the diversity.
With the genre often abandoned to either ‘jukebox’ musicals revisiting old pop, or the mainstream pomp of Lloyd Webber, this combination of B-movie kitsch, Cooke’s 21 new songs, and a scene involving what Davidson calls ‘the scrotumatorium’, make Cannibal Women of Mars a rare example displaying both originality and humour. (Gareth K Vile)
100 THE LIST 13 Jun–11 Jul 2013