Eastgate Theatre, Peebles
3 stars
Robert Louis Stevenson probably wasn’t the first to rewrite Scottish history as a Boy’s Own style adventure, and he certainly wasn’t the last. On the one hand, Kidnapped’s eighteenth century orphan Davie Balfour’s on the run rites of passage over land and sea en route to reclaiming his stolen birthright is a heroic yarn of discovery and derring-do. On the other, it’s a state of the nation dot-to-dot through history that throws Davie together with real-life figures in the ferment of some of the most crucial moments that followed the Jacobite Rising.
Cumbernauld Theatre’s Ed Robson takes advantage of this in his pocket-sized three-person touring production which utilises live and recorded back-projections, puppets and story-telling techniques in a quick-fire romp through the landscape.
If the TV news report is an idea pioneered in Peter Watkins’ seminal film, Culloden, the projections of puppet gladiators on the battlefield looks straight off YouTube. Some of the more scenic projections that accompany Scott Hoatson’s Davie galloping through the glens with Peter Callaghan’s Alan Breck Stewart to Bal Cooke’s rollicking score, meanwhile, look like airbrushed offcuts from a Visit Scotland ad. At times this resembles something akin to the sort of TV drama that marks a political epoch with a telly blaring out real-life news footage at the edge of the human narrative centre-stage.
With Alan Steele doubling up as assorted wicked uncles, sea Captains and redcoats, beyond al this, Cumbernauld’s Kidnapped cuts to the heart of what matters to both accidental wanderers in very different ways. While Davie is learning to be a man, like his comrade and adversary, exile has taught him to believe in something beyond home.
The Herald, April 20th 2012
ends
When Ron Butlin saw a man who’d just asked him the time throw himself under a train on the Paris Metro, it was a turning point in how his 1987 novel, The Sound Of My Voice, would turn out. Twenty years on, Butlin’s tale of suburban family man Morris Magellan’s existential crisis and his subsequent slide into alcoholism is regarded as a lost classic. Prime material, then, for the very intimate stage adaptation which opens in the Citizens Theatre’s tiny Stalls Studio tonight. “I had this friend in London who was an alcoholic,” Butlin recalls. “He would go off to work in the civil service in the morning looking absolutely immaculate. Then at night we’d meet, and he’s get mega-blootered, then go home and continue drinking and end up in a really bad state. I remember staying over one night, and he’d emerge from his room looking immaculate again. There was this huge contrast between what was going on outside and what was going on inside.” We’re sitting in a café on Edinburgh’s south sid
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