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SOCIAL DRAMA EDUCATING RONNIE Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh, Wed 2–Sat 5 Oct; Tron Theatre, Glasgow, Tue 15–Sat 19 Oct DEVISED THEATRE THE COMING STORM AND TOMORROW’S PARTIES Tramway, Glasgow, Thu 10 & Fri 11 Oct
Joe Douglas’ Educating Ronnie is a sometimes heart-warming true story of how he helped his Ugandan friend get an education. Unafraid of asking difficult questions about the relationship between charity and friendship, it’s more than a simple celebration of Western philanthropy.
Director Gareth Nicholls has been involved since the production’s genesis. ‘It was about three years ago that Joe told me about this boy from Uganda that he’d been paying to send to school,’ he remembers. ‘I didn’t know whether he was a hero or a mug for trusting someone he’d only known for six weeks with all that money.’ For Nicholls, the stage was a natural place to tell this story. ‘I like good stories that provoke a strong response,’ he says. ‘We’ve had so many different reactions to Joe’s story: some audience members are in tears while others are angry with what’s happened to Joe and Ronnie.’ Douglas’ story poses tough questions about how the First and Third Worlds collide. Far from a sentimental look at poverty, or rehearsing of platitudes, Educating Ronnie is an entertaining monologue that ultimately insists charity can be expensive and morally ambiguous. (Gareth K Vile)
Forced Entertainment’s previous performances at Tramway – including Bloody Mess, which communicated an overwhelming message through constant miscommunication – have been inspiring and challenging in equal measure. Although they are rightly heralded as one of the UK’s most restlessly experimental companies, they are never obscure and make dynamic, accessible theatre.
For their return, Forced Entertainment are bringing two shows. ‘They are companion pieces,’ explains Claire Marshall, who has been with the company since 1989. ‘The Coming Storm is more in the world of Bloody Mess – a return to multiple narratives and a huge sense of play. And we have live music, for the first time. Tomorrow’s Parties is two performers and a set text which was built through improvisation. It’s simply wondering about the future. It shifts from being pessimistic to being silly and light-hearted.’
Forced Entertainment are never simplistic in either production or plot: their works evolve over a performance, threading together witty characterisation, self-deprecating humour and a passionate belief in the vitality of theatre. (Gareth K Vile)
CRIMINAL THEATRE DARK ROAD Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh, Wed 25 Sep–Sat 19 Oct
Artistic director of the Edinburgh Lyceum and co-writer of Dark Road, Mark Thomson recognises that there is something natural in the theatre’s collaboration with Ian Rankin, a crime writer who has become part of Edinburgh’s cultural landscape.
Dark Road is Rankin’s first play, but inhabits the shady territory of his famous novels: a Chief Constable, played by Maureen Beattie, revisits the conviction of a serial killer while her daughter has developed her own relationship with the killer. Thomson acknowledges that the stage has been missing this kind of crime drama. ‘The genre is so popular in TV,’ he muses. ‘You get violence in Mamet and Pinter, but it is not quite the same.’
There's also the challenge of retaining the unique tension of the crime story. ‘A lot of what we have been doing is preserving those juicy, fun doubts that readers, or audiences, enjoy about the genre,’ he says. ‘Crime relies on doubt and ambiguity and throwing out the odd red herring!’
Undeniably, presenting Rankin’s first play is a coup for the Lyceum, and Thomson promises that the production will ‘maintain his position as one of the extraordinary Scots living and working in Scotland today’. (Gareth K Vile)
SHAKESPEARE MACBETH Perth Theatre, Fri 20 Sep–Sat 5 Oct; Tron Theatre, Glasgow, Tue 8–Sat 19 Oct
‘It’s interesting to be doing Macbeth at a time when people are thinking about the nature of Scottish Independence and the nature of Scottishness itself, because the themes of the play are quite strongly reflected in that,’ says Rachel O’Riordan, director of this new version of The Scottish Play. ‘I’m interested in the fact that Shakespeare wrote the English characters as positive forces, and not just because he was writing the play for the court of James I of England [James VI of Scotland]. He presents the relationship as a question and not an answer: are we stronger together or apart?’
Although Scotland has seen many adaptations of Macbeth over the past few years (including the one-man version by Alan Cumming and at least three from Poland), this co-production between the Tron and Perth Theatre has the virtue of a large cast, and O’Riordan’s attention to Shakespeare’s words.
It’s by returning to the text that O’Riordan, a CATS winner
for her previous directed play at Perth Theatre The Seafarer, has teased out the contemporary parallels. ‘What I also think might be unusual for some people is my interpretation of Lady Macbeth, who was frequently seen as a very tough, masculine woman,’ she says. ‘Yet a lot of her bad decisions are made from a childlike lack of knowledge, which would have been common with women in medieval times: women were chattels rather than autonomous beings in their own right.’
For O’Riordan, this opens up a more powerful connection to the audience. ‘It means a lot of us can relate to her when one bad decision breeds catastrophic consequences. Obviously planning to kill the king isn’t a decent thing to do, but people always forget that she doesn’t actually kill anyone.’ (David Pollock)
98 THE LIST 19 Sep–17 Oct 2013