Artist and Mother...

Always wait, and never speak too soon.


Since Orla O’Loughlin became artistic director at The Traverse, I've been waiting for the moment to comment on her appointment. Not having the pressure of a ravenous public awaiting my proclamations, for once, plays to my strengths. I've watched her first season of programming, her first Fringe, and drew no conclusions. There was a nice emphasis on the young artists emerging out of Glasgow's energetic theatre underground - Hurley, McNair, Drummond - which suggested that O'Loughlin was keeping her eye on the next generation. But The Traverse has such a clear identity already, it is still premature to try to detect her voice within the programme.


However, come November, and her first full-scale production, The Artist Man and the Mother Woman, gives me the excuse to make crass generalisations about how her tenure as artistic director will go.

The Artist Man and the Mother Woman is a new work by Morna Pearson, written in Doric, the northern rural dialect and sounds as if it would fit well with the work Andy Arnold has been supporting at The Tron - surreal, bleak humour and an interest in idiosyncratic emotional relationships. Worryingly for me, and my galloping Oedipal Complex, it centres around a mother and her son. Less worryingly, it sees the return of Garry Collins and Anne Lacey to Pearson's words. They were in her original success at The Traverse, 2006's Distracted.






In terms of the big generalisations - and I'll try to avoid saying that we can expect a series of Scottish women writers - O'Loughlin is connecting her full-scale directorial debut to The Traverse's successful past: not only did Pearson break-out as a writer through Distracted's Traverse production, she emerged from the Traverse's Young Writer's group. And the first reading of Artist Man happened as part of Write Here, the festival that O'Loughlin introduced.






O'Laughlin obviously has considerable respect for Pearson's writing. "Morna is a brilliant scottish writer, with a very distinctive voice," she says. "Her writing is instantly recognisable as her own."


It's unsurprising that the Doric dialect dictates a dour deconstruction of one of the most primal relationships: the stereotype of the North East character indicates a dry, laconic wit and a deep moral seriousness. O'Loughlin adds that Pearson's "work is deeply bound up with where she is from and there is no doubt she is interested in the relationship of people to place." And appropriately for a theatre that has always been committed to new writing, Artist Man originally attracted O'Loughlin as a script.

"I tend to respond to the words i read on the page instinctively and emotionally," she explains. "For me, Morna has a style that tonally dances on a knife edge: at times out and out hilarious, at others profoundly tragic, and sometimes a compelling fusion of both."

Thursday 1 – Saturday 17 November


Previews 30 & 31 October