*4All Back to Bowie's

*4All Back to Bowie's

*1Scotland speaks to the World

Following the Commonwealth Games, the Edinburgh Festivals hold the international spotlight on Scotland, with companies recognising it as a showcase to the world. David Greig, one of Scotland's most influential playwrights, developed an intriguing fusion of spoken word and cabaret formats for *3All Back To Bowie's *2- a cheeky nod to David Bowie's infamous pro-Union speech - that, in part, explores Scotland's relationship to the wider artistic community.

'The festival is always a time to gather, and I think that the referendum debate has galvanised energy, particularly in a section of people excited by the possibilities of independence,' he says. 'So when I said, would you like to do something, but not a play, a mixture of talking and writing about politics in different forms – there will poetry and polemic, and music – people were really keen to take part!'

With a stellar line-up of Scottish talent - from AJ Taudevin to Elaine C. Smith, *3All Back ... *2places the referendum debate at centre-stage, reflecting public engagement, but does not ignore other places. 'Every show will have a letter from somewhere: from Australia, East Timor, America and Croatia and so on. And a lot of the discussion is getting away from a 'hustings'. We wanted it to be about ideas and thoughts. And that brings in other ideas and perspectives.'

Greig does not identify any particular artistic approach as being distinctly Scottish – although he does note that many of the participants have an interest in social justice and change – and the constantly rotating line-up means that, over the Fringe, the show's identity will shift. Each day has a different theme and Greig concludes: 'we want lots of international artists involved: we want to hear from all around the world and we would love people from all around the world to hear us. That is it at the soul of it!'

*10 Stand in the Square, 558 7272, 1 – 24 Aug, 12.40pm, £8 (£6)

David Greig gets own Festival. T in the Park feels threatened.

Sitting in my Tower of Solitude (opposite the Rawalpindi restaurant), I wonder whether Scottish theatre - the stuff that obscures my vision and fills my life -  has any meaning south of Berwick. Occasionally, I receive signals from England that suggest it does operate as part of a wider British theatre scene.

I recently did my first face-to-face interview with David Greig (soon to be broadcast on The Radio Hour). Given that he is pretty much recognised as Scotland's most famous playwright - and certainly one of the most prolific - he was generous with his time, witty and charming. He had a clear sense of his own worth, without being a dick about it. 

I think he more than deserves the David Greig Festival: a week-long retrospective featuring a number of productions, work-in-progress, performative responses and a concluding academic symposium, at which David Greig himself will appear in conversation with leading academics.Sadly, it is in Lincoln, and I am going to miss it.

The highlight might well be the arrival, at the end of the week, when Greig with the Actors Touring Company, brings his celebrated production of The Events to the stage alongside the distinguished Lincoln Cathedral Choir, renowned for its residency in one of Europe’s finest Gothic buildings.

The big thing about The Events that it had a different choir involved in every performance. I bet the Cathedral Choir give it some heft. The Events rocked the 2013 Edinburgh Fringe, and matches smart staging with a compassionate insight into the anguish of loss (in the wake of a massive tragedy). The Guardian loved it so much that they awarded it 'Best Theatre of 2013.' 

Let me have a check of the week's events, and see what I'll be missing... 

Press Release Begins...

The Events will show at the Lincoln Performing Arts Centre on Friday 28^th and Saturday 29^th March

2014, as part of a performing arts festival dedicated to David Greig’s award-winning works.

The production features a new local choir at each performance, with the Lincoln Cathedral Choir set to take to the stage alongside Actors Touring Company at the Lincoln Performing Arts Centre. The musicians will perform an extensive soundtrack, ranging from How Great Thou Art to Dizzee Rascal, yet will be unaware of the events unfolding before them, allowing the audience to share their genuine reactions to the shocking yet humorous script.

The Events will show at the Lincoln Performing Arts Centre as part of the David Greig Festival, taking place from Monday 24^th – Saturday 29^th March 2014.

The week-long retrospective features professional and student-led productions, work-in-progress, performative responses and a concluding academic symposium, at which David Greig will appear in conversation with Professor Dan Rebellato, from Royal Holloway, University of London.

Greig, who is the first dramaturg for National Theatre Scotland and a prominent voice in contemporary Scottish culture, has seen his work performed at prestigious theatres nationally and around the world, including the Traverse, the Royal Court, the RSC and the National Theatre.

Throughout the festival, the public can enjoy a series of plays from his extensive catalogue, including a production of Dr Korczak’s Example by staff and pupils at North Kesteven School on Tuesday 25^th March.

On Wednesday 26^th March, there will be a student-led performance of The Architect, directed by University of Lincoln undergraduate Alex Watson. On Thursday 27^th March, the public can also see a cast of students in The Cosmonaut’s Last Message to the Woman He Once Loved in the Former Soviet Union, a production directed by last year’s winner of the Lincoln School of Performing Arts Student of the Year Award, Lucy Barrett.

Head of School Professor Mark O’Thomas said: “This Festival builds on the incredible work we have done in previous years with the Caryl Churchill, Sarah Kane and Mark Ravenhill festivals.  David Greig is one of our most important living playwrights and it is fantastic that Lincoln is able to host these major international events each year.”

On Saturday 29^th March, the festival will culminate in a one-day symposium bringing together scholars, theatre practitioners and students to discuss David Greig as one of the UK’s most vital playwrights. Speakers include academics from the universities of London, Dundee, Chester, Winchester and Kingston, with a keynote delivered by Dr Clare Wallace from Charles University in Prague.

The symposium will be followed by the final performance of The Events, and a post-show discussion. To find out more about the festival and to book tickets for the performances, visit www.lpac.co.uk.

It's The Vile Top Seven: Number Seven

On The Radio Hour, top DJ and sound engineer at the coolest parties, Josh Hill correctly complained that the annual Hot Lists tend to miss out the personal - as he putting it, "more huffing of poppers outside the Old Hairdressers" and less grand statements about the state of the nation. In this spirit, I wrote a highly personal top ten. Then I realised that "five great text messages" won't end up on anyone's publicity material.

As a compromise, and a sop to my massive ego, I am going to identify the seven top trends in my thinking. This will allow me to mention as many events as I like, and still make it all about me. I challenge the artists mentioned to include my shout out to them in their next application for funding.

Trend no. 7: My Continued Inability to Integrate a Political Consciousness into my Aesthetic Critique.

Fond as I am of banging on about alienation, I still struggle to see the best way for political philosophy to appear within performance. The highly dramatic boycott of Israeli company Batsheva Dance made a passionate appeal on behalf of the Palestinian people, but managed to piss off plenty of liberal critics who found it intrusive (the show was stopped by chanting groups inside the auditorium) and hypocritical (The Russian ballet company up the road didn't get any attention, despite having a state that enjoys oppressing minorities, too).

There are arguments on both sides - mostly focussing on the exact relationship between Batsheva's tour and the amount of funding provided by the Israeli government - but life would easier if the choreographer in question wasn't both brilliant and personally ambivalent about the antics of his government.

While this was the most publicised political action in the arts - it had  similar heavy duty support that would give the weight to the complaints against Creative Scotland - politics has entered the theatre in more interesting ways - Kieran Hurley and AJ Taudevin had a look at the London riots for their entry at Oran Mor's Play, Pie, Pint programme, Make Better Please saw the previously personal Uninvited Guests strain against the build up of media inspired despair, and Lyn Gardner wrote a blog about political theatre in the Guardian. Alan Bissett, wearer of a very cool leather jacket, made explicit his support for an independent Scotland and David Greig set up a dialogue about national identity in his sequel to Macbeth.

In the time that I began writing criticism, the political was on the back-foot. Perhaps it was the amount of money, or moral support, being thrown at the artists under New Labour. Perhaps it was the emphasis on personal politics - like in the version of Wuthering Heights now being prepped for The Arches' Platform 18 Awards, the study of the self and identity was seen as far more important. Unfortunately, I am about to be left behind, having embraced that path - I am still more interested in art as a mirror of the audience than as a manifesto for a better world. But if Greig, Bissett, Taudevin and Hurley are investigating it, I am willing to believe that political theatre is making a comeback and is now relevant.

Glasgow Girls at the Citizens was also the first agit-prop musical that had a dub 7" handed out at the door - its good humoured mix of local history (it covered the campaign to protect asylum seekers), multi-cultural dance numbers and poignant satire made me reconsider both the musical and the theatre as a direct forum for political opinion.

Of course, I have been told by a dear and old friend that "everything is politics," and my continued insistence on the primacy of aesthetics is, in itself, an immoral conservatism. I am hoping that Arika hurry up with their next weekend of engaged readings and gigs. Their Special Form of Darkness weekender had a mixture of serious Marxist analysis and fun nihilism, which suits my anarchist instincts.

NTS Double Bill

The Monster in the Hall and Yellow Moon share a director, a writer, an interest in the way that music can define identity and an enthusiasm for communicating immediately with the audience. Consciously made for ease of transfer - the sets are limited to a few chairs and microphones - David Greig's scripts may be aimed at younger audiences but they refuse to simplify or pander. The Monster in the Hall addresses the anxieties of young carers - including a plug for the support group in Fife: Yellow Moon fearlessly considers domestic violence and absent fathers. Yet neither play can be reduced to an issue: through Guy Hollands' direction, and Greig's straight-talking scripts, the vitality and fantastic plots emerge through the detailed characterisation.

In both works, Greig mixes up story-telling and more conventional theatrical scenarios: the four actors slip in and out of character, inhabiting fantasy worlds, commenting on the action and narrating. Motorbike chases, visits from the social services, montages of farm work, bizarre visitors from Scandinavia, brutal knife fights: all are brought to vivid life by the cast, who jump from mime to banter to directly addressing the audience. The rough mixture of styles, only occassionally noted by the actors in brief moments of comedy, lends the stories a playful immediacy and good humour, allowing some of the more outrageous plot twists to race past without becoming absurd.

Yellow Moon is the more consistently serious: the old Stagger Lee Blues becomes a leitmotif, as a modern day teenager gangster runs into the wilds to find his long-lost father. Accompanied only by silent Leila - her attraction to this sometimes charming bad-boy is only slightly developed, a rare lapse in Greig's attention to detail - Stag Lee risks life and limb only to discover that his father is as irresponsible as the son.

Although Greig's conclusions are spotlessly moral - Lee's violence is eventually punished, and he is forced to confront his own behaviour - a sense of fun pervades even the most dire moments of the adventure. The beauty and danger of the countryside is conjured through Greig's language and the challenges of city life, along with the weight of celebrity culture on the shoulders of the excluded, are presented. Yet no grand conclusions are drawn: Lee and Leila are victims of the pressures of teenage life, and their attempt to escape is doomed to failure.

This uncompromising vision, and the respect given to teenage problems, makes Yellow Moon a mature example of youth theatre. Opportunities for preaching - Lee's loutish ambitions or Leila's self-harming - are sensitively handled, and acknowledged as part of life. Because the play imhabits a teenage consciousness, some of the minor characters are only roughly sketched, or played for laughs, yet the loose format suits the rough and ready story.

The Monster in the Hall is both more ambitious in scale and lighter in tone. Duck looks after her father, who is suffering from MS. Between trying to negotiate a romance with a potentially gay suitor - he wants a blow job to prove he is straight, she wants something more sincere - and avoiding the apparent traps of a concerned social worker, Duck longs to become a writer.

Alongside Duck's tough reality and fantasy novel escapism, Greig adapts an almost musical atmosphere: the cast sing interludes and  are plunged into comic scrapes. The tension mounts and the Monster - clearly defined as a metaphor for those hidden fears but also a literal motorbike being fixed in the house - is eventually resolved into an asset.

This time, Greig is more direct in his message: the chaos of Duck's life is mostly her own invention, and the finale, when Duck finally reaches out for help, is a less complicated resolve. The slapstick fun, however, skates over the encroaching darkness of Duck's desperate attempts to be normal and, again, the attention to teenage detail is winning.

Both Guy Hollands and David Greig are obviously committed to a youth theatre that is not patronising, that encourages discussion but rarely gives easy answers. Hollands has drilled his actors into a vibrant versatility, and chases through Greig's scripts, never rushing but always energetic. Double bills like this are in danger of giving theatre for young people a good name.

She Plays

The Fringe has barely finished - well, I am still licking my wounds from it and hoping that I don't get ill after a month of sleeping on floors and eating on the run - and the Autumn seasons are starting up. There's even a few themes emerging, to give me a chance to create another idiosyncratic top five...

The strength of women is an oft-recorded part of recent Scottish history, at least as far as the theatre remembers it. The Steamie emphasised the importance of women's work in Glasgow in the 1950s, and two plays in Dundee celebrate the role of women in difficult times.

She-Town pretty much lays it all out in the title. An ambitious project from Dundee Rep, adding a cast of community performers alongside their core actors, it goes back to the depressed 1930s and highlights how women kept the city running. Starring Barbara Rafferty - best known for her TV work in Rab C Nesbit but has been a sparkling Scottish stage presence over the past decade - and a very large cast of women, Sharman MacDonald's new play is supported by a new Creative Scotland fund.

First in a Lifetime is designed to make work that opens up creativity to new people: this time, it has enabled community performers to appear in a professional production. Given that She-Town is all about  community, it's appropriate that this fund is supporting it.

12 - 29 September @ Dundee Rep


It's a bit cheeky to include Stellar Quines in my rundown of "theatre about women" - their remit has always been supportive to female artists. However, they have teamed up with Greyscale to run a tour by one of the world's oldest "new writers": Sylvia Dow is 73, and this is her first play.

A rehearsed reading last year revealed Dow's sensibility echoes the absurdism of Beckett, but with an added compassion and strong sense of contemporary anguish: while the early absurdist theatre entertained through a combination of lurking fear and the pointlessness of life, Dow pitches the horror of a relationship going nowhere, caught in the cycles of repressed hopes and polite reconciliations. It fits into both the Traverse's New Writing remit and the programming of Andy Arnold at the Tron (he loves a nice bit of absurdism), and Dow becomes an interesting take on the entire idea of "the young writer".

5- 8 September @ The Tron
18- 19 September at the Traverse

It's rare that I get out to the Brunton Theatre - although when I do, I get to go for a paddle in the sea and have an ice-cream from the lovely shop just across the road. The Brunton does have a programme that operates independently from the theatres in Edinburgh, featuring plenty of touring companies up from England.

Miriam Margoyles whetted my appetite for Dickens' Women at the Fringe, and the Brunton has followed up with Miss Havisham's Expectations. A one-woman show starring Linda Marlow (she once did Berkoff's Women, so will be familiar with the bloody end of female fictional characters), it takes up the story of Great Expectations and confronts the venerable Victorian author with the truth about the woman he trapped inside a moment.

Using biographical details from Dickens' life alongside the famous novel, Di Sherlock's script takes the writer to task for playing God with characters that he does not understand: and while adaptations can be a lazy way to make theatre, Miss Havisham's Great Expectations ignores the conventional period drama cliches and recontextualises one of fiction's great, lost tragic heroines.

Saturday 15 September @ Brunton Theatre

Next up, The Guid Sisters: I have talked about this already, but it is a bold start to the new season at the Lyceum. The NTS are involved, too, and it is one of the rare times that a piece starts at the Lyceum and doesn't force me to travel to Edinburgh to see it: it is coming to the King's, Glasgow, in October.

21 September - 13 October @ The Lyceum
23 - 27 October @ The King's, Glasgow 


Towards the end of next month, another project led by Cora Bissett (after Whatever Gets You Through the Night and Roadkill, she is becoming a force in Scottish production, even before looking at her acting) reveals a hidden history. The Glasgow Girls were seven young women who stood up for the rights of asylum seekers - a tough, political story that is perfect for a musical adaptation.

A script from David Greig and original songs from Bissett, MC Soom T and John Kielty (who has been perfecting the punk musical during the Fringe), the musical is no schmaltzy song-fest, but a celebration of the Glasgow that longs to find the true meaning of inclusion and multiculturalism. The NTS are involved again - the energy and imagination of the nation's big company is looking undiminished as it heads towards its eighth year - and both Bissett and Greig have reputations as hard-hitters.

31 October - 17 November @ The Citizens 

Latitude Day 1, Part 1

Before I start to write, I need the right combination of chemicals in my bloodstream. Fortunately, those not provided by my body can be easily injected or snorted, or discovered in a spoonful of raw instant coffee. I tried to get my first evening at Latitude written up this morning - I was first at the press tent and everything. Unfortunately, it turned out that I needed to actually see a show to have something to inspire me.

I had hoped getting lost on the way to the Festival would help: Mr B helped up by not putting the right postcode into his Sat Nav. "It's looking rather quiet for the main route into a major festival," I pointed out. A silent u-turn, and the first aristocrat of Chap Hop had us back in a comfortable tail-back.
My prediction from Mr B's hour long set in the poetry tent - which, up to that point, had been like an illustrated lecture on why I hate poetry - is that this August will be the Fringe of Chap Hop. People will be wandering the Royal Mile humming Acid Ted and plaid will make an unexplained come-back. Mr B would not be funny if he didn't have such a detailed understanding of how hip-hop works: unlike most of the slam poetry boys, he has a flow as well as the ability to speak really fast in rhyme. Plus he gave me a lift from the station.

After failing to write anything coherent this morning, I popped down to the Faraway Forest (the twee name for one of the various stages here) and made contact with the National Theatre of Scotland. It bothers me that the NTS are being so good lately: even David Greig, whom I delighted in calling over-rated, just because it made me different to the other critics, has hot form twice this year. The NTS are invading Suffolk with The Strange Undoing of Prudentia Hart, a confident mash up of karaoke, Border Ballads, choreography and scripted theatre. Since it is usually performed in a pub, the transition to outdoor festival is easy. Until, as Ali Macrae reminds me, it is set in a Thurso pub, cut off from civilisation by winter snow.

Trying desperately to appear knowing and cool - and not give away my enthusiasm for both Macrae's music and Madeleine Worrall's sensual, witty performance as the titular heroine - I led us off to a shady groove where we swapped tales of Scottish critics, Govan bars and local sessions. Behind us, a performance of a Greek myth seems to be reviving The Brian Blessed School of Acting. They shout in unison and distract me from an anecdote about my family band and how Kylie Minogue's Can't Get You Out Of My Head is, actually, a self-referential masterpiece.

Minogue is important in Prudentia: Worrall's version exposes its gentle heart beneath the pulsing, shimmering glamour. Macrae and Worrall warmly discuss the way that folk music is used in the play, suggesting that the modern session can be found anywhere a karaoke machine has been installed. The mix of new and old, folk and pop, script and movement, humour and intensity make Prudentia an interesting herald of a specific Scottish style of performance. It's brilliantly written, too.

And so... is that Richard Dedomenici in the cabaret tent?