Tron Theatre, Glasgow 3 stars When Ella Hickson’s debut work appeared at the fag-end of the twenty-first century’s first decade, her octet of monologues tapped into a similar emotional and spiritual void that had fascinated a new wave of playwrights a decade before. Almost half a decade on, the student-based NewUpNorth-Scotland company’s revival now looks and sounds like a little time capsule of a fragmented society at rest and in motion, with each of Hickson’s characters taking pause for thought at what they’ve become. Nowhere is this more evident than with Millie, the jolly-hockeysticks hooker who tends to poetry-loving toffs put out to grass by the rise of New Labour. With David Cameron’s Westminster government posher than ever, one suspects the Millie of today would either be serving her constituency with renewed gusto or else find herself side-lined as her boys pack some Bullingdon-sired lead in their pencils elsewhere. While many of the pieces now look similarly of their time, others remain ageless. Council-estate skivvy Bobby is a sadly familiar portrait of a woman failed by the state, while Astrid’s salvation through illicit sexual liaisons and teenage boy abroad Jude’s getting of wisdom are both ageless. While having all eight performers onstage gathered in a circle around a large table implies some kind of communal confessional, as the lights go up and down on each in Mark Stevenson’s production, it also lends things an air of quiz show contestants awaiting their chance to shine. Fortunately, there are several finely nuanced performances, particularly from Scarlett Mack as Bobby and Maria Teresa Creasey as Astrid in a still moving compendium culled from observations of very recent history. The Herald, June 14thth 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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