Internationalism and collaboration on scales both great and small were
very much on the agenda for a year in Scotland's theatre scene that
rode the recessionary wave with some consistently ambitious programming
that wasn't afraid to mix up classical and popular forms. The tone was
set right at the start of the year when Vox Motus presented their
biggest show to date, The Infamous Brothers Davenport. As scripted by
Peter Arnott and conceived by Candice Edmunds and Jamie Harrison, the
play dissected the alleged supernatural powers of a pair of
vaudevillian siblings with a box of tricks all of their own.
Vox Motus' look at artifice and belief was oddly book-ended at the end
of the year with a set of similar themes from Peepolykus' The Arthur
Conan Doyle Appreciation Society at the Traverse. Both were bested,
however, by Rob Drummond's Bullet Catch, a close-up solo dissection of
the same terrain that created real magic out of similarly styled hokum.
Also at the Traverse was BEATS, another solo show written and performed
by Kieran Hurley. As with Drummond's show, BEATS was produced by The
Arches in Glasgow, and was a searingly insightful portrait of the early
1990s rave era, when hedonists were first outlawed then politicised by
the Criminal Justice Bill that effectively attempted to make electronic
dance music illegal. Aided by DJ Johnny Whoop, Hurley delivered his
trilogy of stories with the evocative engagement of a rave generation
Spalding Gray.
Other solo shows featured the pleasure of seeing Samuel Beckett on a
big stage in Dominic Hill's production of Krapp's Last Tape and the
rarely seen Footfalls. These two miniatures closed Hill's inaugural
season as artistic director of the Citizens Theatre, which had peaked
so spectacularly with David Hayman's return to the Gorbals to play the
title role in Shakespeare's King Lear.
Also making a prodigal's return was Alan Cumming, who played a solo
Macbeth in John Tiffany and Andrew Goldberg's National Theatre of
Scotland production. With the action re-imagined in an asylum, Cumming
gave his all in an unmissable performance. Another unmissable NTS show
was Enquirer, an all too timely verbatim look at the state of print
journalism today.
Of the independent companies, Stellar Quines premiered ANA, a
remarkable bi-lingual Scots-Quebecois collaboration developed over
several years that chartered one woman's voyage through history. This
imaginatively staged production was overseen by Quebecois director
Serge Denencourt, who returned to Scotland later in the year to direct
the NTS' revival of The Guid Sisters, Martin Bowman and Bill Findlay's
vivid Scots translation of Quebecois writer Michel Tremblay's equally
female-focused play, The Guid Sisters.
Vanishing Point, meanwhile, upped the ante by being included in the
Edinburgh International Festival's exemplary theatre programme with
Wonderland. This was a taboo-busting and discomforting peek into an
online rabbit-hole where porn stars and porn users live a troublingly
symbiotic existence.
In a year of arrivals and departures in terms of artistic directors,
Rachel O'Riordan came good with a revival of Frank McGuinness' Someone
Who'll Watch Over Me, while James Brining's parting shot as artistic
director of Dundee Rep was a revival of Zinnie Harris' Further
Than The Furthest Thing, notable for a stunning water-based set.
While Andy Arnold directed a magnificent stage version of James Joyce's
Ulysses at the Tron, at the Traverse, incoming director Orla O'Loughlin
set out her store during August with
Dream Plays (Scenes From A Play I'll Never Write), a series of early
morning performed readings put together quickly, but which served up
some of the most imaginative work on the Fringe.
If O'Loughlin ushered in her tenure with such glorious scratch-works,
she nailed it by directing what was, alongside BEATS, the best new play
of the year by a country mile. Morna Pearson's The Artist Man and the
Mother Woman was a jaw-droppingly dark comedy about a molly-coddled
teacher's belated coming of age. Written in Pearson's scatological
Doric, it tapped into the insular brutalities of a small-town
underclass in a way that announced a major writing force to the world.
The Herald, December 31st 2012
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