The Performance Geography of Glasgow: City Centre

The concentration of theatre venues in the City Centre suggests that diversity is Glasgow’s hallmark. From The Arches - a re-purposed collection of warehouses beneath the train station - to the Theatre Royal, the venue of choice for both Scottish Ballet and Opera: Glasgow runs the gamut of styles and spaces.

The Arches’ programme reflects artist director Jackie Wylie’s enthusiasm for experimental and emerging artists. During her tenure, two festivals (Arches Live! and Behaviour) have shaped the programme into two distinctive strands. There are the local and emerging artists - most frequently seen at Arches Live! or in works-in-progress throughout the year - and the makers of ‘expanded theatre’. 

As the chosen venue for the National Review of Live Art until 2010, it has strong associations with performance art and its atmosphere - somewhere between a dungeon and a night-club - conjures up an underground den where anything seems possible. When David Overend studied The Arches for his Ph.D, he recognised that its multi-purpose space (it is also a nightclub, and has a rather nice restaurant) lends performances a spectral resonance. 

Further east, Andy Arnold, formerly of The Arches himself, has

reclaimed The Tron as a theatre where words are celebrated. The annual Mayfesto, originally a celebration of political theatre, has tackled themes of identity and post-colonialism, while affirming The Tron’s commitment to scripted theatre. The opening production of the 2014 Autumn season, John Byrne’s adaptation of Chekov’s Three Sisters is typical only in so far as it is based on a script: Arnold is more likely to book or direct classic texts than find a relatively recent work, possibly from an Irish writer. 

The adaptation of Ulysses in 2012 revealed how effectively Arnold could channel language into bold theatricality, and a rare commission - The Tron tends to use existing scripts - Land And Sea and Sky (2010) married a naturalistic staging with a script that examined World War I through arguments as much as action.

Both The Theatre Royal and The King’s Theatre are run by the Ambassadors’ Group, and are part of a national chain of theatres, which includes The Playhouse in Edinburgh. Although they do produce shows - most recently, West Side Story with the ‘original’ choreography - these are made nationally, not in Glasgow and the majority of performances are from touring companies. 

Occasional amateur productions fill out the King’s calendar, but the majority of productions are of musicals or popular plays, including work from John Godber , Alan Bennett and The National Theatres of Scotland and England. 

Other venues that include theatre in their programme include the CCA and The Glue Factory. The CCA has an ‘open source’ strategy - artists can book the theatre - and this has included a recent Butoh festival Moving Bodies and a production of The Madness of Lady Bright by Cardboard Fox Company. The CCA has a long history in Glasgow’s alternative arts scenes . Previously The Third Eye Centre, director Francis McKee has done much to research its past glories and consciously models its current identity on the freedom and eclecticism of its earlier years.

The Glue Factory was, until recently, the home of 85A, the

collective who have made a splash with their cross-platform, post-industrial entertainments. Although The Glue Factory is still in a state of redevelopment, with part of the premises acting as rehearsal space for The National Theatre of Scotland, the nights staged by 85A, including an interactive film Chernozem, and the Fringe for the Glasgow International Art Festival (GI), suggest it is an untapped resource for performance. 

The Pantosphere

This man is the King of the Palace, Kilmarnock

It's December and the theatres are committed to a popular art form. Aside from the odd resistance from the cabaret community - there's Torture Garden and Missy Malone's burlesque evening and the more experimental artists of Anatomy - it's either pantomimes or, for the more sophisticated families, the Christmas themed entertainment.

The bursts of cabaret make sense: sharing the heritage of vaudeville with pantomime, they can take advantage of a lively audience in need of warmth and fun in the darkness months. On the west coast of Scotland, however, the dominance of pantomime has led to each of the different venues finding their own, distinctive version. The King's Theatre has the slick, professional show - now challenged by the SECC - the Tron gives it a Glaswegian twist, now teaming up with Johnny McKnight after years of Forbes Masson scripts - and the Pavilion is the anarchic, slightly risque remix: Jim Davidson might not be in it this year, but his appearance for two years does explain the tone and target audience.

The changing face of pantomime

Despite these regional variations, pantomime is innately conservative: there are a variety of set-pieces (in Kilmarnock, Liam Dolan has been rewriting similar scenes into different plots for eight years), the jokes are supposed to be bad and the audience interaction is ritualistic. A bad pantomime is marked by the failure of the cast to get these routines swinging. The usual parameters of good theatre - remembering lines, strong characterisation, consistent pace and structure - are replaced by the need to make sure that the audience are disruptive in the right way.

In a recent interview with The Skinny, McKnight pointed out that many of the tropes of pantomime are shared with the sort of performance emerging from the Live Art scene. Brecht's rejection of "the fourth wall" is mirrored by pantomime's emphasis on direct engagement with the audience. In much the same way as Beggar's Opera reminds the audience that it is a fiction, the constant slipping in and out of character, the bit where some cute kids are dragged on-stage and the dispensation of sweeties from the stage make pantomime more like a game, or the Mass.

Perhaps the most disappointing consequence of this conservatism is that the potential of pantomime as a purposeful theatre has been neglected. Its carnivalesque spirit allows it to poke fun at authority: the Pavilion pantomime has the occasional shot at the council and gets very close to sectarian humour (although to laugh at the rivalries rather than to harvest the rich fields of nasty bigotry), and the Tron, in the Masson years, had a habit of mocking the other, rival shows. Yet even in the most parochial pantomimes, there's no attempt to give the details a satirical bite.

The conservatism of the form, then, is mirrored by a social conservatism. If political theatre is coming into its own again, the pantomime isn't joining in. It's a good example, perhaps, of how popularity can limit ambition: having discovered a good product, theatres seem unwilling to risk extending the form or content.

This isn't absolute - McKnight's increasing presence on the festive scene brings the sensibilities of his Random Accomplice work, and the Lyceum, The Citizens, The Traverse, and the National Theatre of Scotland (with their Christmas Carol) all present plays that are more closely connected to their usual output. However, these might be examples of how a niche can be found in the Christmas market.

He's enjoying imself

Given its long history - it goes back to classical times, through medieval mummers' plays and to the music hall - its surprising how little influence pantomime has beyond its own month. There are few examples of pantomime influencing theatre, even though its techniques aren't especially divorced from contemporary practice and it achieves audiences that most most companies envy.

A few exceptions aside - Ali Maloney did a grotesque pantomime last year at Arches Live, and I, Tommy slid from political satire into broad comedic antics pretty quickly - pantomime feeds the theatre neither with audiences nor ideas. It seems to exist in a splendid isolation, preserving the traces of music hall (Johnny Mac at the Pavilion has the genuine aura of a 1930s comedian, catch-phrase like a twitch at the end of every sentence), 1970s humour and the belief in entertainment that can be for all the family (with the odd "one for the dads").

Perhaps most importantly, pantomime is the one place where the Hegelian model of synthesis is played out in its most immediate format.

Oh, no, it isn't.

Oh yes, it is.

Oh no, it isn't.

Get on the Guid Foot

I'll admit that I was confused by the press release for The Guid Sisters. Vicky Featherstone, artistic director of the National Theatre of Scotland, called it "not only a Scots classic but it is also a timely portrayal of women and economic survival." Then director Serge Denoncourt added "Forty years ago, in Quebec, everybody was talking about a new play: Les Belles-soeurs by Michel Tremblay." I had to go straight to Wikipedia and find out how a Scots classic could begin life as a French Canadian revolutionary drama.

Tremblay's original shook the conservative theatre of 1960s Canada, and was written in local dialect. His plays, which often feature that rare phenomenon, good parts for women, reflect his belief in the matriarchal nature of Quebecois society and he has been an outspoken, if awkward, advocate for Quebec's independence from English speaking Canada.

Given the tradition of Scottish plays that emphasise the power of women (The Steamie, She Town), and the political arguments about Scottish national identity, the translation into Scots, by Bill Findlay and Martin Bowman, was probably inevitable. 

The NTS/Lyceum co-production has managed not only to find a cast of fifteen women, including Karen Dunbar, but has enlisted the author's director of choice in Serge Denoncourt. Denoncourt is perhaps most famous for his production with Cirque du Soleil, but says that "Les Belles-soeurs became a fetish play, a lucky charm for me," following his first stab, at about ten years old, when he learnt it by heart and performed it in the street for his mates.

Denoncourt was mostly recently in Scotland working on Ana for Stella Quines - visually ravishing, this time-travelling epic attempted to compare the status of women in different eras: the presence of Karen Dunbar, best known for Chewin' The Fat, suggests that this production might be bigger on the laughs. And although the plot revolves around a grand prize of Green Shield Stamps (something else that probably needs to be checked on Wikipedia), the meat of The Guid Sisters is in the banter and conflicts between the large group of women.

Despite its origins in Quebec, it does fall nicely into the tradition of The Steamie - it's set in Glasgow, it's working class, it's about financial hardship, it has plenty of humour and community.

Lyceum, Edinburgh

21 September – 13 October 2012

Kings Theatre, Glasgow                                                                 

Tuesday 23 – Sat 27 October