Tron Theatre, Glasgow 4 stars Anyone expecting Marie Jones’ ingenious two-hander about a Hollywood film crew descending on a rural Irish village to be a full-on knockabout romp is in for a surprise. Because so adept is Jones at the theatrical and comedic double-bluff that what starts out as a sit-com style yarn about a couple of film extras on the make becomes both an elegy for a dying community and an artistic call to arms against a form of colonialism that denigrates the culture it feeds off. Some sixteen years after the play first appeared, Andy Arnold’s new production for the Tron arrives with a renewed vigour perhaps informed by the current climate of recession. Jake and Charlie meet on the set of a tax-break enabled windswept epic being shot on their doorsteps, and featuring a real-life big-screen starlet as the female lead. For an impoverished work-force, the forty quid a day the men earn is easy pickings. When a teenage drug addict is found dead in the river after being refused a job on the film before being thrown out of his local, the initially hilarious war of attrition between Jake and Charlie on one side and a roll-call of film crew flunkies takes an altogether more serious turn. By having two actors play all the parts, Jones not only embraces a poor theatre aesthetic, she also sets up a fantastic vehicle for actors to leap aboard. Keith Fleming and Robbie Jack do this with slick, well-drilled aplomb without ever losing sight of the play’s serious points. As an intelligently populist crowd-pleaser, it can’t fail. As a critique of the ongoing corruption of mass entertainment, it’s deadly. The Herald, July 12th 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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