Tron Theatre, Glasgow 4 stars Alison Peebles is on her feet for the entire eighty-five minutes of her new show, devised with Belgian director Lies Pauwels and an ensemble of three dance artists and a little girl for the National Theatre of Scotland. For this most charismatic of actors, it must be agony. Not for having to carry this defiantly impressionistic meditation on her life as a performer who was diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis twelve years ago, although that must be hard enough. Rather, for a woman who confesses her love for shoes but who can’t wear high heels anymore, having to watch lithe young bodies stretch, pirouette and cavort with choreographed perfection from the front corner of the stage must add insult to an injury that’s not of her making. This, though, is the point of the exercise, which puts the body politic centre-stage in a series of routines underscored by a jukebox full of early 1960s pop hits, and played out in a mint-coloured room with a glass-fronted pink boudoir at the back. The little girl sports a sparkly scarlet dress as she announces a potted history of Peebles’ wild years. One of the performers dressed as a ballerina spins out of control, showing off injuries of her own. Another howls into a microphone, while the sole male onstage dances in the same scarlet frock. If this is all post-modern showbiz, only the bobbed figure of Peebles in a dressing-gown is for real. Led carefully out in heels once more, as she turns physical debilitation into a fiercely defiant work of art, the pleasure on Peebles’ face as she gets to walk tall once more is an image to treasure. The Herald, September 14th 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
Comments