Dundee Rep 4 stars Life is one long tea-break in Chris Rattray’s 1960s-set play, first seen on Dundee Rep’s stage fourteen year ago, and now revived in Andrew Panton’s solidly assured production. Performed back to back with Sharman Macdonald’s She Town, this is the male flip-side to that play’s women only zone, as it follows a sextet of mill workers escaping from the daily grind via the laddish banter of the rest room and its accompanying toilets. It’s here we meet simple-minded skivvy Archie, old lags Robert, Geordie and Jim, upstart Teddy-Boy Henny and Beatle-loving Kevin, who mark time indulging in assorted shaggy-dog stories and pranks with seemingly little consequence. Out of this comes a lovingly observed portrait of working class society in flux that revels in its localism even as it follows in the work-play tradition of John Byrne’s The Slab Boys and Roddy McMillan’s The Bevellers. Barrie Hunter’s pompous Robert and Martin McBride’s nasty Henny are both relics from an earlier age, while only Jonathan Holt’s music-loving Kevin is looking towards any kind of future. It may be Guy Mitchell’s She Wears Red Feathers that opens the show, but it’s Please Please Me by The Beatles that closes it. If those two recorded tunes book-end the play, it’s Michael Marra’s original songs, performed live by the cast, that provide its pulse. Soaked in grizzled pathos and wry observations, stylistically they encapsulate the move from skiffle to rock and roll to the 1960s beat boom that acts as a metaphor for society’s even greater shifts. The malicious act that thwarts Kevin’s ambitions is telling too of how old orders cling to power by any means necessary. 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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