Dundee Rep 3 stars If Dundee was Scotland’s first female-led republic, it is all but reborn in Sharman Macdonald’s epic tale of life in the city’s jute mills during the 1930s depression. Wages are being cut every week, and a strike led by would-be writer Isa looks imminent. Elsewhere, legendary singer and Spanish Civil War veteran Paul Robeson is booked to play the Caird Hall, and auditions are underway for a local choir to back him up. In some respects, the latter element reflects the sheer scale of Jemima Levick’s production, which puts some forty women onstage to deal with Macdonald’s multi-layered narrative. This begins with a sick child, a loaded gun and some mass constructivist choreography before opening up Alex Lowde’s huge skewed tenement set where smaller lives epitomised by Isa and her feisty sisters dwell. If Isa’s aspirations lead towards Spain, other women make different choices. For some, sexual allure will keep them in glad rags, while mill owner’s wife Moira Blair short-changed herself years ago. Even Isa, luminously played Joanne Cummins, must face up to the brutal life and death realities beyond the romance of revolution and the liberating power of song. The choir’s auditions rub up against the tenement scenes with a busyness that at times feels overloaded. That’s not to say this isn’t a play full of heart and soul, led as it is by a principle cast of nine featuring such mighty talents as Barbara Rafferty, Carol Ann Crawford and Morag Stark, and supported by the Rep’s Young Company and Community Company. When the onstage chorus drawn from the theatre’s Women’s Singing Group accompany Robeson’s recorded voice at the play’s most poignant moment, its power is immense. The Herald, September 17th 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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