“Look at the size of it,” says actor Sandy Grierson in the top floor rehearsal room of the Citizens Theatre in Glasgow after dropping a telephone directory size document onto the floor with a thump. Grierson is in the midst of the massive undertaking of bringing Alasdair Gray's epic novel, Lanark, to the Edinburgh International Festival stage in a new dramatisation by David Greig contained in the script which Grierson has just sent on a downward trajectory. Under the guidance of director Graham Eatough, and in the shadow of a city which has been reimagined enormously since Gray first mythologised it as a grim dystopia he called Unthank, Grierson and a cast of largely familiar faces from Scotland's acting scene have just been running through the play's opening moments. Grierson plays Lanark's eponymous hero, who, on arriving in Unthank with no memory of his past and unaware of who he is, embarks on a voyage of discovery en route to becoming an artist in a collapsin
An archive of arts writing by Neil Cooper. Effete No Obstacle.