Truth and lies are at
the heart of this year's Mayfesto season, which runs throughout May
at the Tron Theatre in Glasgow. While this annual boutique festival
moulded in the image of the long lost Mayfest strand retains its
politic heart in these austere times, very intimate explorations of
identity in all its myriad forms focuses a more skewed eye on things.
There are plays such as
Seamus Keenan's Over The Wire, which, in film director Kenny
Glenaan's return to the stage, looks at the effects of riots in the
notorious Irish prison in Long Kesh in 1974, at the height of the
Irish Troubles. Ankur Productions, meanwhile, present Jukebox, which
looks at oral histories of the Glasgow Asian community.
Writer/performer Daniel Bye presents The Price of Everything, a
performance lecture on value which Westminster's Conservative Culture
Minister Maria Miller might well learn something from. Throughout all
of these, the politics of this year's Mayfesto remains deeply
personal.
Nowhere is this more
evident than in two shows which take very different looks at the
nature of truth and memory, but which may well reach the same
conclusion. Where As It Is finds Serbian born actor and associate
artist of the Glasgow-based Vanishing Point theatre company Damir
Todorovic interrogating his own past via the use of a lie detector,
Bandages is writer and director Kirsty Housley's look at two sisters
surrounded by sensationalised headlines of real life crime whose own
reality crashes down around them.
“I saw a show in
Belgrade in which an actor ran on a treadmill for an hour,”
Todorovic says of the roots of As It Is. “He was saying his lines
the whole time, and I was very impressed, but it also started making
me think about the relationship between reality and fiction. That
made me want to do a show with a lie detector, though at the time I
had no idea what that might be, but I wanted to pose the question of
whether we could live without lies.”
Todovoric,has appeared
with Vanishing Point in Interiors, The Beggar's Opera and the
company's 2012 Edinburgh International Festival show, Wonderland. No
stranger to dark places in these shows, for As It Is, Todorovic
subsequently pushed himself to confront his own relationship with his
recent past when, in 1993, he was forced to go into the frontline of
the Balkan conflict.
“Thinking about this,
after twenty years, it feels like a dream,” Todovoric says, “so
thinking about what's happened since in terms of my identity, I was a
little confused. What happened was my own experience, but some of
that could be products of my imagination. So I wanted to see what has
happened to my memory, and to the memory of the people, and to
examine all these experiences.”
For Bandages, Housley
too looked to real life events, albeit on a seemingly much more
domestic level, when she read a newspaper report about a young girl
who killed her sister.
“They were very
young,” says Housley, who has worked with more left-field theatre
companies, including Told By An Idiot, Complicite and The Paper
Birds, “and there was a real co-dependence they had between them.
They'd had an argument about something really mundane, like one
borrowing the other's top without asking, but there was clearly a
much bigger frustration going on beneath that.
“That really got me
thinking about sibling relationships, especially as I live on the
same road as a pair of identical twins, who live together, and dress
and move in exactly the same way. I wondered, did you really both
wake up this morning and decide to put on the same clothes, or is one
of you the dominant one? There's something going on there about
power, control and a really intense form of love.”
The result of Housley's
thinking is a piece of what's described in the publicity material for
a show co-produced by Teg Productions and the Corn Exchange Newbury
following development at the National Theatre Studio as 'cinematic
theatre.' While Bandages doesn't use actual projections, Housley
looks to big-screen sisters such as those depicted in Whatever
Happened to Baby Jane?, as well as imagery from horror film, Carrie
and The Killing of Sister George.
“That image of a
woman covered in blood carrying a knife is almost a cliché,”
Housley observes, “and I think there's a real tradition in film of
portraying female neuroses and psychosis onscreen in that way. These
are difficult representations of women, which I feel drawn to, but
which I also feel uncomfortable with.”
At the play's heart,
however, is an investigation if truth that runs parallel with
Todovoric's in As It Is.
“It's partly about
making things up,” Housley says, “about telling the truth, or not
telling the truth, or about telling something that sounds like the
truth, but isn't. That makes you question your family history, and
what you need to put in place to get by.
“I think we've
reached a really interesting point in time, where you can see people
writing history, but where there's this idea where it's the winner
who gets to write that story. I think we've reached a point as well
where a lot of people are telling a lot of lies, and where local
papers are being quite irresponsible by saying that the world is
frightening and that people aren't to be trusted.”
Both Housley and
Todovoric put some kind of faith, at least, in humanity's ability to
get beyond such scare-mongering.
“We don't need
machines to discover what is deeply within ourselves,” Todovoric
says. “Contact with human beings is much more important. That's how
we find the truth.”
Mayfesto runs at the
Tron Theatre, Glasgow, May 1st-20th; Bandages, May
3rd-4th; As It Is, May 14th-16th.
Mayfesto – The best
of the rest
Flaneurs – May
1st-4th - Jenna Watt's solo show about the nature of
violence has been doing the rounds for some time now, but its
dissection of whether or not witnesses to assaults should intervene
or not remains as pertinent as ever in a beguilingly poetic piece of
work.
Who Runs Scottish Culture (And What Is It Anyway?) - May 9th
– When Alasdair Gray's essay, settlers and Colonists, was published
at the end of 2012, despite some serious factual inaccuracies, it
provoked a fiery debate regarding self-determination and who is in
charge of Scottish culture. In response, a panel of Scottish artists
and commentators come together to discuss the issues further.
The Poetry of Fences –
May 11th – Performance, poetry and song are on the
agenda for this multi-media dissection of the global village by
performance duo, Zorras, Aberdeen singer Fiona Soe Paing and
Toronto's Gein Wong, with explorations of race, gender and migration
well to the fore.
The Agony and Ecstacy
of Steve Jobs – may 17th-19th – The all pervading
presence of Apple products is put under the spotlight in Mike
Daisey's monologue, first seen in this production in Edinburgh in
2012. Daisey exposes the use of sweatshops in China where under-age
workers are watched over by armed guards in an ethically dubious
industry.
The Herald, April 30th 2013
ends
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