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The Price of Everything

Tron Theatre, Glasgow 4 stars A pint of milk costs fifty-one pence. Body parts can be bought and sold for far greater sums. But how much would an air guitar go for on ebay? Or an imaginary friend? Think about those last two questions for a minute, and you should realise the sheer absurdity of a market-led economy in recessionary times. Writer/performer Daniel Bye has, and has woven his findings into this quietly utopian performance lecture, which he brought to the Tron's Mayfesto season for one night only on Sunday night. With just a power-point presentation, a chair and enough bottles of milk to give everyone in the audience a glass, Bye serves up and dissects the facts and figures behind our money-driven society before offering up an idealistic alternative which just might work. This comes in the form of a shaggy-dog story about finding a twenty pound note on a train, which leads to Bye and a stranger in a Garfield t-shirt founding a free milk bar which further ins

Bandages

Tron Theatre, Glasgow 4 stars June and Jane live in a world of their own in Kirsty Housley's curious new play, directed by herself for Teg Productions and the Corn Exchange, Newbury for last week's brief Mayfesto run. According to the shock-horror headlines, outside there's a serial killer on the loose attacking young women just like them. Even a quick trip to the supermarket for a pint of milk becomes a potential murder scene. Inside, the two siblings are safe, seemingly mirror images of each other, who dress identically and role-play their mother's rape by a butcher and their own subsequent birth. When Bob comes calling with ice-cream for June, the games become a lot more dangerous and a whole lot closer to home. Set in a wooden box full of assorted sized flaps that open out onto the big bad world outside and wallpapered to clash with June and Jane's flowery frocks, Bandages takes the dark iconography of big-screen psycho-sexual schlock-fests and tur

Jukebox

Tron Theatre, Glasgow 3 stars Nothing can unite the body politic quite like music, even as listening to it or playing it remains an intensely personal experience. Such notions are the back-bone of Ankur Productions' charming look at pan-Indian identity through the eyes, words and, above all, songs of those who left their homeland for Glasgow, and the younger generation they sired. In what is part concert, part oral history, some fourteen community performers of all ages tell their stories, both on film and in the flesh. As they relate their tales of exile and arranged marriages on the one hand, and facing the Glasgow cold at the 'Barras on the other, the result of Shabina Aslam's Mayfesto production, which sees the cast perched on a network of white-painted boxes, is a crucial mash-up of traditional Indian mores fused with a brash contemporaneity. While the older women sport saris as they talk of a time before Bollywood had been named thus, the younger ones w

The Seagull

Citizens Theatre, Glasgow 4 stars “ We are sleepwalking to oblivion,” says would-be literary iconoclast Konstantin in John Donnelly's audacious new version of Chekhov's look at life, art and the imitations of both. It's not the most un-Chekhovian line Donnelly tosses into his knowingly modern mix, but it's not a bad start. Here, Alexander Cobb's Konstantin is a theatrical brat intent on breaking the mould via the sort of site-specific performance that's all the rage these days. The fact that his old-school actress mother Irina is doing the dirty with tortured artist Boris, and that his play, performed half naked by Pearl Chanda's star-struck Nina, is the sort of pretentious tosh that gives experimental theatre a bad name, doesn't help his cause any. With all about him pumped up on prescription drugs and booze, amidst his bluster and grand poetic gestures, Konstantin can't even get it together to shoot himself. While Donnelly reta

Auditory Hallucinations

The Bongo Club, Edinburgh 4 stars Do you remember the first time? The first time you played mass games of statues, perhaps, a first kiss, or the growing pains of impending adulthood that will leave all that innocent stuff behind for more serious life and death affairs? Young experimental theatre company Creative Electric do, and even though the three performers onstage in this devised interactive miniature look barely out of therir teens, their wisdom goes before them in spades. After being given headphones at the door, an audience of fifteen is ushered into one of the Bongo's dark club spaces as a sonic collage of babbling voices invades our ears and minds. As they guide us round the space, performers Michael Collins, Laura Fisher and Robbie Gordon share a series of personal epiphanies inbetween explaining how the brain deals with memories. Sometimes these are accompanied by little dance moves. Other moments are soundtracked by melancholy electronic melodies as unknown

Mayfesto 2013 - Where The Personal is Political

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 pers

The Sash

Adam Smith Centre, Kirkcaldy 3 stars When Hector MacMillan's play about religious bigotry in a Glasgow tenement first appeared in 1973, hand-me-down sectarianism was rife. Forty years on, that same bigotry still blights the west coast of Scotland, and Bill MacWilliam, the staunchest of unreconstructed Orange-men who the play pivots around, is as recognisable as ever in Michael Emans' Rapture Theatre production. Set on the morning of the annual July 12th parade, widowed Bill and his grown-up son Cameron are suffering. Cameron has looked beyond the blinkers of what he's been taught, and is refusing to march, even if his girlfriend Georgina sides with his father. With Bill at war with Catholic downstairs neighbour Bridget and her pregnant daughter Una, it takes a drink-fuelled accident for anything like reconciliation to take place. While MacMillan's play starts off comic, it's saying some deeply serious things, not just about bigotry, but about how beli