Greek @ Scottish Opera

1.    All reviews – like opinions – are subjective, a unique combination of the experience under consideration and the experience and personality of the reviewer. They are not, despite the occasional attempts by certain critics to trick the reader into believing that this review is definitive, absolute or objective. If an objective review were possible, it would immediately make the entire process a waste of time, since there would only never be the need for one person to attend and describe an experience.

2.     This review is being written after attending Scottish Opera’s production of Greek, February 2018, and having had an experience both boring and irritating. After the first twenty minutes, during which the novelty of hearing East London chat sung in beautiful operatic voices hadn’t become predictable (or, as in the second art, dropped for a more familiar poetic language), the performance felt trite, the dramaturgy underdeveloped and the attitude towards the working-class culture it represented on stage patronising. Musically, Turnage’s score had plenty going on – there’s a nice drum accompaniment to the battle between Eddy and a pair of Sphinxes, and the rattle and clatter of its recognisably contemporary composition eloquently expresses the emotional depths of the characters. But the production itself felt lazy, with some ill-conceived interludes of physical comedy and a set – a blank wall with two entrances – that flattened the performances and, used only to rotate at certain scene breaks and as a projection screen, an unimaginative scenography for a libretto that is full of intriguing mythic detail.

3.    I returned to a computer, expecting reviews of the previous outing for this production – at the Edinburgh International Festival, 2017 – to express some of my frustrations. However, it had been universally lauded, and called ‘relevant’. I am especially surprised that no comment was made on the unimaginative staging, and the patronising representation of Londoners. I became aware that my opinion was very much out of step with the other reviewers (but not necessarily with a proportion of the audience with whom I had shared this experience).

4.    The reviews regarded Greek as ‘edgy’ and even satirical, seeing its political cynicism as reflecting a current set of anxieties.

5.    The audience at The Theatre Royal, in a large part, had cheered and applauded. Many people seemed enthusiastic. Other people were merely polite.

6.    There are three main reasons that I dislike the production: the apparent lack of imagination in the dramaturgy; the physical presence of the actors and the choreography of certain scenes; the lack of any sense of connection to my experience. I think that I rather liked the music and while the plot was incoherent, this didn’t destroy my enjoyment.

7.    Since the plot was the Oedipus story, made famous by Sophocles, its incoherence needs to be qualified. The juggling of plot points – Eddy marries his mother directly after killing his father (and for no good reason) – disrupted the elegance of the narrative’s inevitability; the introduction of Sphinxes and a plague into a contemporary London, with allusions to civil disorder and Margaret Thatcher, was a mythical interlude that undermined the London setting of the opera; the revelation of Eddy’s true parentage is not teased out but revealed in a single song, which could have happened at any point and had no sense of dramatic tension. However, these problems could have been addressed in a production that was willing to offer more than a blank canvas for its dramaturgical construction.

8.    Usually, I address a performance in terms of its intentions. This may come to be problematic in this case, because, having read other reviews, I am writing in response to the absence of my experience in those other reviews. There is also the problem that it was difficult to discern quite what this production’s intention might be: the projection of some relatively recent tabloids onto a screen doesn’t make it ‘a comment on contemporary social values’, the parody of Oedipus’s traditional self-mutilation isn’t quite strong enough to make this production a wry commentary on tragic values. The use of fetish wear on many of the characters – or, I’d say, a suggestion of it – doesn’t bring out a playful world of sexual pluralism but just looks like some opera singers dressed inappropriately.

9.    The singing was more than serviceable and the orchestra were great. This isn’t a critique of the quality of the artists’ ability, except in their acting and movement skills. The latter were so dismal that it becomes of question of why the production considered having tentative choreography as part of the production, beyond it being something that Greek tragic choruses did.

10.                   The dancing was mostly performed by three cast members, who did something suggestive of being riot police beating demonstrators and a pastiche of musical vaudeville. Not only was the choreography unimaginative, it was executed clumsily and undermined any atmosphere conjured by the singing, either comic or serious.

11.                   However, this is a sub-category of the problem of the dramaturgy. Dramaturgy, in this case, does not signify the work of the dramaturge but the process of adapting a script into production: it’s the time and space of theatre. It’s the choices of interpretation made, the use of design in scenography. It’s the vision of the director and the performance styles of the singers.

12.                   The scenography is a beautiful summation of the problems in the dramaturgy. It’s a white blank wall that doesn’t quite fit the proscenium arch of the Theatre Royal. It rotates every so often, with the two doorways moving over the singers, if they remain on stage. The stage-hand shoving it was visible, so it disrupted the integrity of the world on stage. That doesn’t matter, because Brecht introduced the world to the deliberate exposure of theatre’s mechanics and it’s not like the world on stage was an illusory depiction of London’s grimy underclass. But it was just a bit sloppy.

13.                   The wall had projections onto it, sometimes the lyrics, sometimes video montages that filled in the plot – notably how the mother had lost her son – and occasionally suggestive sequences of food splashed all over the place or tabloid newspapers. They were alluding to the wider context of the world of the opera. They were clumsy, obvious but not particularly enlightening, although the bit where some mayonnaise was squirted over beans was funny, because it was like a cum-shot from a naughty movie. Maybe that was the edgy part. And maybe the tabloid headlines were showing us how so little has changed since Greek’s first production in 1988. But having a picture of Boris Johnson isn’t enough to make this a satire of the Conservative government.

14.                   The dramaturgy relied on a blank canvas to add context to the opera. Funnily enough, that doesn’t work.

15.                   What appeared to be a theme in costumes – rubber fetish gear – was opaque. Some waitresses, the coppers and Eddy’s dad were wearing it, but it wasn’t clear why. For the police, it did seem as if their abuse of protestors might have a sexual element – you know, BDSM as law-enforcement, but the gear wasn’t that good: one copper had a t-shirt underneath it, so it’s wasn’t like a serious effort. The waitress outfits were more convincing but this idea – the fetishization of identity – wasn’t carried far enough. When Eddy sings about an apron as a symbol of motherhood, there’s something, but I get really bored by people wearing gear that meant to be sexy or mean something, but doesn’t really work.

16.                   These are problems in the visual dramaturgy: they don’t add up to a layer of meaning on top, or integrated into, the singing. While this was going on, the singers did their job, but it never resolved into any kind of clear interpretation. It was a bunch of stuff happening.

17.                   Did I mention how uncomfortable the performers looked during the vaudeville scene – which was a choral interlude? They did the sand-dance moves and a big of jigging about. It was simply crappy. There’s a critical word that isn’t used often.

18.                   Claiming that a theatre production doesn’t speak to my experience is a bit specious in most cases: an important function of theatre is about giving voice to other experiences, and I don’t have any meaningful experience that makes sense of Greek tragedy beyond watching and reading Greek tragedy. But in this case, I am simply using that phrase to repeat an earlier accusation, and hopefully clarify it. It presented the London working-class as being stupid and trivial caricatures. As it happens, my maternal family comes from the area that provides the setting of the first scenes. They were Arsenal supporters. They use the words that are presented for laughs in the libretto. I thought they were represented as a series of cheap jokes, and their culture was reduced to a parody.

19.                   There’s nothing wrong with being critical of a culture, only the question of an opera having a laugh at a marginalised group shouldn’t need too much elaboration.

20.                   In the end, all the characters were unsympathetic which, again, need not be a problem except when there’s a swelling of music signifying emotional engagement. If you don’t give a fuck about anyone on stage, the question of whether or not they did their mum becomes irrelevant, and Eddy’s final defiant acceptance of having got in his mum’s knickers lacks any force. It’s just more stuff that happens.

21.                   Equally, it doesn’t relate well enough to the absolute shit-storm that we are all living in to count as satire.

22.                   As it goes, I do like the fancy, detailed and expensively designed operas that Scottish opera produce. I know it’s not the only way to produce opera, and is probably a bit obvious, but I enjoyed it. The performers tonight had no gift for the comedy that lurks in the libretto, and it lacked chemistry for the sexy aria at the start of Act II. But since the comedy never landed, that’s another dramaturgical problem.

23.                   I’m not saying the other reviewers are wrong or stupid, but I wish that my experience had been represented.

24.                   But now it has been. And that’s the purpose of criticism.

The 8th Door @ EFT 2017

1.
It's easier to write a manifesto about how criticism ought to be than to write criticism that is revolutionary. It might also be easier to write criticism than to write a play, and perhaps this is enough of a spur to make criticism better. It's not like a review forces the writer to research their personal anxieties and put them out in public. They can just point out that one of the actors didn't enunciate clearly enough, and sleep like an innocent.

Performers Elicia Daly, Pauline Goldsmith and Gresa Pallaska during development for The 8th Door.  Credit Mihaela Bodlovic.

2.
I wouldn't like to make assumptions about Matthew Lenton's personality based on his work, even though I have seen quite a few of his pieces. If I went by the ones I enjoyed the most, I'd imagine that he struggles with the implications of sexual desire, finds intimate relationships disappointing and worries that the internet is going to destroy our interior lives. 

But I'd be ignoring Beautiful Cosmos and his adaptation of Beggar's Opera, because they don't deal with Modern Love. In fact, it's likely that the description I made is not of Matthew Lenton, but of me. The Eighth Door, made in association with Scottish Opera, however, does address these issues. 

Performers Elicia Daly and Pauline Goldsmith  Credit Mihaela Bodlovic.

3.
There is a large projection screen at the back of the stage. The two performers talk into video camera. Their images are relayed onto the screen, as they flirt and seduce each other (through the medium of video). They toast each other. He hands her a rose. The image of the screen fades between them, measuring out the journey from tentative meeting through desire, through fulfillment, to failure and rejection.

I keep thinking that it isn't a screen at the back of the stage but a mirror. 

4.
The Eighth Door is an opera, in so far as there is singing and a score by Lliam Paterson. But it is also a work of post-dramatic theatre: the score, the actions on stage, the video projection run parallel to each other. All of the elements are alienated.

5. 
Although it is a response to Bluebeard's Castle, The Eighth Door is performed before the Bartok opera. This may be to make sure that regular opera goers don't leave before the main event. 

Lliam Paterson and Matthew Lenton during The 8th Door development. Scottish Opera & Vanishing Point 2016. Credit Mihaela Bodlovic.

6.
The 'truth' of criticism is the task of finding the 'truth' within a work of art. Sometimes that 'truth' is disagreeable. Sometimes it is wrong. Sometimes it only exists at the point of connection between the critic and the art work. There may be no 'truth' (in itself the truth). 

Crash @ Tron

I want to reach the Western Lands-- right in front of you, across the bubbling brook. It's a frozen sewer-- it's known as the Duad remember? All the filth and horror, fear hate, disease and death of human history flows between you and the Western Lands. Let it flow! My cat Fletch stretches behind me on the bed. A tree like black lace against a gray sky. A flash of joy.

How long does it take a man to learn that he does not, cannot want what he "wants?"

So, yes, Crash: it's already had its spin on the critical merry-go-round. Somewhere between three and four stars, if I remember and wise heads nodding and alluding to its critique of capitalism. Spoiler alert: think of a British American Psycho, a smaller body-count but the same emotional detachment in the protagonist, caused by attention to numbers. Audiences need a victim though, and this time, the protagonist's bird gets it. An aborted baby and a vicious stabbing are contained in the take-home party bag.

Blah blah blah, the set is sparse and a drone crescendos in the latter

stages. A monologue, nice and cheap I guess, and only the single perspective (he never admits to the kills, gets away with it, although the circumstantial evidence puts him at the scene of the crime). Enough ambiguity around though: was he always so emotionally distance? Is that what made him so successful on the markets - he does get slightly aroused when he makes serious losses? Was the death of his wife (the title's a pun, you see: an economic crash and one in his car, at the start) the trigger for disassociation? 

Whatever, the message is pretty clear. The current economic system is bad, as it converts humans into machines, or something like that. This tragedy - and a pregnant women getting stabbed up counts, and maybe even the hero's lack of remorse or care - reflects the personal cost of playing the stocks and shares. 

I did know this already. I say know... maybe I am wrong. This is fiction, after all. Maybe brokers go home and are kind to animals and babies. Frankly, the way that the Conservative party acts in the interests of big money, I assume they go home and eat babies. 

Oh yeah, it is tautly directed - except one time when a scene change is marked by the intrusion of a tune, in that way directors do when they can't think of another way to shift attention. But the lighting, the drone towards the climax, the focus on a single man... it's tough to keep the attention when the hero has no feelings. But that's a triumph. So's the performance. 

Do you want a star rating now?

Sorry, I have been distracted by the apocalypse. More plays that attack the status quo would be grand, thank you. And yep, the emotional cost of being a money-grubbing asshat is worthy. Kind of puts it into the human perspective. Coming from the arts, I'm always glad to see a successful bastard become a hollow shell. Keep it up, team theatre.

However, I am getting an attack of the Platos. He worried that performance, especially acting, was contaminated - a reflection of a reflection of the truth, written by a poet who didn't really know what they depicted. Without getting all 'write what you know' about it, I can't trust Crash. It's wish-fulfillment for the liberals. Here's the guy who did it. We are not to blame, with our piddling little bets on the Footsie Index. The guys running this are amoral psychopaths. Murdering his wife is just a metaphor for what his type are doing to the world, man. 

Keep telling yourself there is nothing wrong with mimesis. Sleep well, knowing you've seen a play that makes it clear. 

'Everything that happens is created by you.'

Confidence is everything in the world of high finance. Confidence in yourself, confidence in the market. Lose that and you lose everything.

Crash is the story of an enigmatic trader attempting to rebuild his life following a tragic event. As he takes the first tentative steps back into the brutal landscape of trading stocks, he feels the pressure begin to build.

In the continuing wake of the financial crisis, Scottish writer Andy Duffy creates a rare and poetic insight into the psychology of a banker’s world.

Directed by Traverse Associate Artist Emma Callander, acclaimed for recent festival hits Cuckooed (Fringe First Award) and Theatre Uncut (Fringe First and Herald Angel Award).

Written by Andy Duffy

Directed by Emma Callander

Theatre review: The Bodyguard

Based on the blockbuster film starring Kevin Costner and Whitney Houston, Thea Sharrock's direction of Alexander Dinelaris' script is heavily on the spectacular: familiar tunes from the film – including I Will Always Love You  - are given full-blown diva attention by Alexandra Burke as the heroine Rachel Marron and what is lost in character development is hidden by the all-singing, all-dancing chorus-line and the fast-placed melodramatic plot.

Although there is a slight suggestion that Marron undergoes a personal journey towards humility (after winning an Oscar, fortunately), the story is driven by her relationship with the stoic, yet sensitive Bodyguard Frank Farmer – played by Stuart Reid with an appropriate restraint. As Rachel, and her sister, prepare for the climax of her career, a stalker gives chase, allowing Frank to defend her with his mix of straight-talking and paternal sensitivity.

The plot, however, simply provides a framework for the musical numbers, and even the  climatic confrontation becomes fodder for the resolution of Frank and Rachel's relationship. Fortunately, the fast pace and the lavish routines and set provide excitement and virtuosity enough to compensate for the lack of character development. Frank is a cypher of romantic masculinity, but Rachel's unpleasantness in the first act – she even steals Frank from her sister – is not redeemed.

However, the show is not about the script: it is about the emotional songs and the romantic tension between the showgirl and the bodyguard. Teasing the audience in the first act, the performance builds to the finale, that famous love song of regret and acceptance, and the flashing lights, dynamic dancers, bold choreography and relentless energy ensure that The Bodyguard delivers the expected excitement.

52 Shades of Maggie

The Straw Chair (Borderline)

The revival of Sue Glover's script The Straw Chair is a canny move by Borderline theatre company. It hasn't been seen outside of the central belt before, even though it belongs to a period when Scottish theatre was developing a powerful tradition of scripted theatre. Glover herself can be seen as one of the dynamic artists who, in the 1980s, began to give Scotland scripts strong enough to challenge the best international work and, unlike 7:84's famous Cheviot, offer a repertory of plays that could be recreated. 

Bondagers went on to become Glover's most revived script -

perhaps because it gives more opportunity for the dynamic mix of physical and scripted theatre that has dominate theatre during the 1990s and influenced the first generation of National Theatre of Scotland's artistic directors (Blackwatch is a well-known example of how movement was used as a story-telling device). Yet The Straw Chair examines similar themes - the nature of the rural environment and its impact upon its residents, Scotland's history and the oppression of women. But while the scope of Bondagers is broader, covering an entire community, and more explicit in attacking a feudal system, The Straw Chair is more detailed and precise. A single woman's fate is at stake.

Lady Grange - possibly the protagonist of The Straw Chair, since her biography formed the inspiration for Glover's script - is a difficult character. An alcoholic, when circumstances allow and a thief, in order to make circumstances allow for alcoholism, she is an unlikely heroine and has little of the dignity required for her to be a symbol of women's oppression. Having irritated her husband, and possibly threatened his political and social security, she is abducted and dumped on St Kilda. Her attempts to escape are foiled, and she is finally defeated, embracing something that appears like madness.

This much is historical: whether her sexual intensity and regal antagonism to her maid is equally historical or Glover's imagination is theatrically irrelevant, but it makes her a superb female role. Raging against her husband and his allies, encouraging the desire of the recently arrived couple, she has a tragic dignity, if not social respectability. Yet she exists in a stasis. Trapped by geography and her memories of a decadent past, Grange turns inward, wasting her intelligence on plotting how to steal brandy and provoke her companions. Her moving final speech, in which she ruminates on her fate, is hardly an acceptance but a fragmented attempt to make sense of her doom.

Yet her story is explicitly an example of injustice, how the Scotland of the early 1700s handled problematic women, excluding them through force and violence. The arrival of a minister, who initially regards her with distaste, allows Glover to emphasise the gap between the civilised veneer of Edinburgh society - piety and aspiration - and the harsh treatment of those who did not fit. His faith in the good offices of Edinburgh gentlemen is destroyed by the end of the play. Coming to accept Lady Grange's victimhood, his Christianity forces him to reject the social order that might offer him a livelihood. 

This tension, between the oppression of women and the smiling

piousness that managed it, drives The Straw Chair. By being set on St Kilda. it embraces the romanticism of the islands, even as it reveals the hardship of the island life. The recollections of Edinburgh and its niceties contrast the tough yet simple lives on St Kilda against a dishonest luxury. Lady Grange's confusion, aided by drink and spurred on by her husband's infidelity, becomes the confusion of a nation caught between urban and rural modes of living.

Borderline's production gives the script plenty of space, placing the performances and scenography at the service of the words and disguising the social commentary beneath an apparently period drama. The love for St Kilda expressed by the minister, his wife and the single character who lives on the island by birth and choice echoes the romantic call for simpler times - even the sincere religion of the islanders is uncomplicated by the detail of theology and tangled in more pagan worships - yet the power comes from the mainland and  the aristocratic system that enables trade.  

Scottish identity has become a major theme in contemporary theatre - Dunsinane  grappled with it, and even Some Other Mother, a play that is about the injustices of immigration, asks questions about how Scotland defines itself against other countries. The Straw Chair casts a critical eye over the past, juggles with a true story and the idealism that imagines St Kilda as a lost paradise, provoking most where it entertains.

Mark Thomas wonders who is watching

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Cuckooed review

//Subhead

Mark Thomas wonders who is watching

//Author

Gareth K Vile

//Star rating

4

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Polemical and intense, Mark Thomas merges the political and personal in this taut and true tale of friendship, activism and betrayal. Based on Thomas' experiences campaigning against the arms trade – and explaining why he would become the trade's scourge – it examines the question of whether one of his closest allies had been spying on him for the people that they both protested.

Thomas' charisma carries the story, even in those episodes which require concise political detail. While he still manages the occasional joke, he is clearly moving away from being a stand-up comedian towards an effective, dramatic monologist. Using video projection to bring in a range of verbatim speeches from other members of the campaign, and trying to draw a rounded picture of how it felt to be betrayed, Thomas reveals a sensitivity to theatrical spectacle, even as he insists on the piece's integrity and honesty.

Emma Callendar's direction keeps the pace sharp, but it is Thomas who – as the writer and performer, and the heart of the story – maintains a ferocity that is equally personal and political. His passion for freedom from surveillance, and belief in the possibility of change makes this more than a drab, rhetorical exercise. It is an appeal to action.

Tomorrow @ Tramway

Vanishing Point have made a virtue of eclecticism: while their productions share a commitment to high production values and an integration of text, scenography and precise direction from Matthew Lenton, they tackle subjects as varied as violent pornography, moral corruption, existential doubt and, in Tomorrow, the onset of dementia and death. Reducing Tramway's expansive space to an intimate stage, through Jamie Harrison's austere design, Lenton's study of a man's final days is a moving elegy that refuses sentimentality.

At just over an hour, Tomorrow abandons a typical dramatic story for a series of allusive episodes. The transformation of the young man into his senile self is quickly effected, through encasing him in a latex mask, and the following scenes - the lounge of a hospice, a sneaky cigarette with the nursing staff, a sudden burst of loud music and desperate action - examine the dwindling hours as he is gradually submerged in his dementia. From the vague interactions with the other patients to the difficult reunion with his daughter, whom he inevitable mistakes for his wife, the hero only briefly longs for escape before the lights, then the sounds, disappear.

Lenton's dispassionate direction makes Tomorrow all the more melancholic: rather than build towards a dramatic resolution, he allows events to take their course. An attempted escape from the hospital becomes poignant, and the final scenes descend into a comforting darkness. Tomorrow evokes a state of confusion, tracing the sad journey of one man as his life, and memory, slowly fades to black.

Heart @ The Tron

Pitch Black

The Pitchfork Disney is a tough challenge: set either in a dystopian future, down the back of someone's subconscious or in a house two doors down from mine, it constantly flickers between moods and modes (paranoid and funny, seductive and monstrous), connecting its four characters through their barely expressed desires and shared alienation. The protagonists (a pair of twins, full grown, not identical but infantile) discover that their fear of the world outside is justified, when Cosmo Disney and his acquaintance (Cosmos doesn't do friendship) turn up and usher in sexual longing, the threat of violence and snapshots from the entertainment underworld.

Heroes Theatre make the most of Ridley's script's ambiguity. The staging is sparse - a single sofa - but colorful - the world beyond the twins' house is guarded by a shimmering tinsel curtain. Eve Nicol's direction refuses to force any additional context onto the series of disjointed, disorientating episodes, allowing the disorientating collision of dreams and fantasies to exist in a suspended reality. From here, both Alan MacKenzie (Presley Stray, the male twin) and Stephen Humpage (Cosmo) are given space to turn their speeches (described by Nicol as 'party pieces') into extended monologues of unfocused terror. Since Presley's main strategy for coping with horror is relating his fantastical dreams, even the sharp interjections of Cosmo never ground the play in a recognisable reality.

Although Ridley is strongly associated with the British neo-brutalist writers of the 1990s, Pitchfork's aggression is psychological. Pitchfork himself is a mash-up of gimp, enforcer and freak show star. Handled with menace by Patrick Stratford, he delights in exercising his power in a final comic moment, yet is manipulated by Cosmo into exploiting his disability. The tension between Cosmo and the Stray twins comes not only from Cosmo's paranoia about homosexuality - and rapacious desire for the sister - but in the conflict between their world views. Cosmo claims no parents and absolute self-sufficiency, while the twins depend on memories of their parents to define their existence.

By allowing the script to exist in a contextual vacuum, the production emphasises its various themes: Cosmos' skills as a showman become strategies to remove Presley and leave sister Hayley open to his attention; the conflation between the sentimental and savagery exposing how violence can be masked; the dreams of Presley spiralling towards an erotic fantasy of complete annihilation - and lurk at the back of it all, a fear of death through intimacy (an unsurprising trope from theatre made in the time of AIDS' emergence).

The taut direction, and largely naturalistic performances (Humpage, in particular, plays up Cosmo's street urchin distrust rather than his fairground extravagance) drives this interpretation hard and fast: Ridley's language is both poetic and littered with pop culture references, like a literary bricolage that slams together pain, hope, life, desire, lust, suppression, ghosts, fear, compassion and rage.

Miss Julie @ The Citizens

 Although Strindberg's Miss Julie is recognised as an important moment in the development of 'naturalism' in theatre, Dominic Hill's direction of Zinnie Harris' updating owes as much to Brecht and classical models of tragedy. The sparse, neutral set and the broad characterisations of the central couple, servant John and the daughter of the master Julie firmly define the story as the tragic destruction of a woman, drawing out both the proto-feminism of Strindberg's source script and the oppressive society that defines individuals less by potential or personality than by their status.

The heart of the plot lies in the seduction of Miss Julie by the servant, John: although Louise Brearley plays Julie with an initial haughtiness, Harris' John is clearly in command, his changes of mood less capricious than the calculated attacks of a bully intent on getting his way. There is a palpable lack of sexual frisson between this John and Julie: Keith Fleming performs John with a consistent brutality, rarely swaggering, never sensual. That Julie can be seduced by a braggart and a bully  - his confession of love for her is unconvincing but calculated to appeal to her romantic dreams - is alienating and uncomfortable.

It is here that Hill's Brechtian influence is most evident.  In his attempt to make theatre that has a socialist

message, and can promote political change, Brecht developed the idea of an audience that is more intellectual than emotionally engaged. By encouraging a distance between the performance and the audience, Brecht hoped to exposed the structures beneath the action, and allow the audience to observe how the events could have played out differently. With Fleming's brutish performance, it becomes difficult to understand why Miss Julie would be erotically fascinated by the servant: his kisses are rough, not in any animalistic sexual manner, but like an attack. When he suddenly drops her, after having had her, it is clear that he is interested in her as a means to satisfy his own ends.

Without the sexual chemistry that has made Miss Julie a morally ambiguous study of sexual and social power-plays, it is clear that Brearley's Miss Julie is not seeing the same John as the audience. Her clumsy flirtations in the early scenes suggest less maturity than she claims: the scripts descriptions of her father's savagery and Julie's treatment of her fiance imply that she is familiar with violence and is attracted by her seducer's thuggishness. From his scenes with his fiancee Christine (Jessica Hardwick), John is revealed immediately as arrogant and chauvinistic. Even before John confesses his love of Miss Julie - which he describes as a virus in a bluff, antagonistic complaint - it is clear that he is a bully.

Hill's production exposes Miss Julie's mistake: and it is here that the plot takes on a tragic tone. Miss Julie does follow some of Aristotle's 'guidelines' for tragedy: there is a unity of location, time and plot, and there are three actors, just as in the golden age of Athenian drama. Miss Julie's story  - like a tragic heroine, she is high-born - follows the predictable path towards her doom. Her failure to recognise John for what he is become her 'tragic flaw' (hamartia).

By presenting Julie as naive, and John as vicious, Hill's production both highlights the tragic line of the plot and alienates the audience from an easy emotional engagement with either character. It's a remarkable trick: Brecht regarded his approach as an antidote to the aristocratic bias of Aristotelian tragic theory. Naturalism - a theatrical movement led by Ibsen and Strindberg (which concidently overlapped with their mutual interest in the role of women in society) - is less of a bridge between the two modes than a specific response to the rise of science in the nineteenth century, rejecting supernatural interventions (like the gods of Greek tragedy of Hamlet's father's ghost) and following Darwin's ideas about evolution (exposing human personality as a product of natural selection).

This naturalism is a far cry from the 'gritty realism' of contemporary drama, and Harris' adaptation builds on the psychological depth of Strindberg's characterisation to explore the specific dilemma of a woman, like Miss Julie, who has been encouraged to act like a man (by her mother) and beaten (by her father). By delineating this characterisation so precisely, Harris reveals Strindberg's talent for expressing the motivations of his characters and allows the production to create the emotional distance between audience and performers without forcing the actors to slip into caricatures.

By updating the play into 1920s Scotland, during a strike, and recasting the Lord as a mill-owner determined to break a strike, Harris doesn't so much lend a contemporary relevance as locate the sexual battle within a wider set of social changes. John, like many bullies, is cowed by the master's presence - suggesting that his attitude towards women is based in insecurity - and Christine voices a conservative and religious faith in the rightness of hierarchy. Off-stage, the striking mill-workers celebrate (and are defeated): a reminder that the upsetting of the sexual hierarchy expressing in the tryst reflects wider conflicts.

It also adds to the claustrophobia of the final scenes, when Miss Julie realises that she cannot escape. Strikes
are preventing travel, and the father's guards are poised to prevent her leaving the estate. Both the old and new social orders are restraining Miss Julie: that John talks proudly of the workers' resistance (while failing to actively support them) is a reminder that supposedly radical political change may not address the oppression of women.

True to the tragic influences, the unfolding of the plot is pessimistic: only through death can Miss Julie escape. But Fleming's John provokes her suicide, turning back into the lowly servant on the return of his Lordship and using the threat of his wrath to terrify Julie. The lack of compassion from both Christine and John isolates Julie - Christine's sudden aggression is an explosion of emotion from beneath the placid acceptance she displays in the early scenes. It is only in the final moments that the mesh of Brecht, naturalism and tragedy is betrayed: the suicide is presented as a sudden black-out, Brearley holding the knife to her throat in a melodramatic pose.

The final is an act of bad faith in Hill's sophisticated direction: the subtle interaction between the subtext of the seduction and the performances is undermined by crass emotionalism. Fleming's John is reduced to a melodramatic villain, and Julie is stripped of her dignity as a tragic heroine. Throughout the play, there are shocks - the rough kisses, the sudden reversal of John's enthusiasm when he realised that he can't use Julie to fulfil his fantasy of being a businessman. Yet the last image is contrived to surprise, to present horror rather than fear and pity (as in Aristotle's strictures) or intellectual analysis (per Brecht).

The Slash My Father Swore

The decision to play The Sash as a period drama, despite it recounting a relatively recent period of history, isn’t necessarily a confession that the script has lost its relevance. In the period after the Good Friday Agreement, the vivid descriptions of terrorist attacks and the sporadic racist references are more likely to connect to the current War on Terror and Islamophobia than the battle for a united Ireland, yet the core prejudices on display – sectarianism from protestant and Roman Catholic - are still, sadly, part of Glaswegian life.

Most strikingly, the obnoxious behaviour comes from both sides of the divide. The aging Orangeman is given the most melodramatic, and comic, bigotry, but his Catholic neighbour gets in a fair few digs. Even today, there is something outrageous about hearing this kind of language on stage and the message – that the conflict in Ireland was originally not about religion but freedom – is supported by both sides insistence on a loyalty to a parents’ values.

Perhaps the differences between 1973, when the play was written and set, and 2013 are in the aspirations of the younger characters. There is a rejection of older values, with a protestant son wanting to discuss the historical truth behind the myth of Good King Billy and the pregnant Catholic daughter rejecting the certainties of her faith’s moral teachings for a socialist alternative. And the rare reference to the Soviet ideal of Russia is jarring. The aftermath of the USSR might not have revealed the propaganda of the USA as accurate, but it undermined that nation as a shining example of universal brotherhood.

Yet the conflict between the generations, and the final failure to find an honorable solution, lends The Sash its relevance. Its vision of the Orange Order as a fading presence might have been premature, but the arguments between son and father have an almost archetypal ferocity. Snippets of information about William of Orange’s allegiances and conduct contextualise his hagiography by the Order into a brutal history, and the details of bombing in Ireland locate the action in a period when paramilitary activity was intense: yet the intergenerational throw downs could come from any year in the past fifty.

Because the conflicts described in The Sash `are still present in Glasgow, it doesn’t quite slip into a complete period drama: the issues are more immediate than those in the political plays from south of the border written in the same period. It carefully charts the way that political upheaval impacts on personal life. A relationship collapses, a father tumbles out of a window, a Catholic aunt berates her niece for being pregnant outside of wedlock and the vitality of Irish Republicanism and Orange Pride are gradually ossified.

The question of whether The Sash would make much sense outside of Scotland is pertinent: when intellectuals talk about Scottish identity, they conveniently ignore the sectarian divide even though it is one of the most distinctive qualities that distinguish English and Scottish cultures. There are enclaves in England, such as Manchester, that have a similar relationship to the past. However, the mutual loathing of Billy and Tim is rarely so noticeable in the south.

Rapture are being difficult by restaging this classic. It would be far easier to put The Sash in the same category as The Bigot and The Pavilion pantomime, relics of a by-gone age. Unfortunately, the numbers in the audience attest to its popularity, and the nihilistic vision of culture – nobody wins the argument, and only the final song, which insists that once men were “neither orange men nor green” is a tattered flag of hope – is a bracing counterblast to the optimistic predictions of the contemporary politician. Respecting the way that the play itself is awkward, being neither clearly political nor personal, historical nor contemporary, this production, Michael Emans lets the story tell itself, not even flinching at the unappetising attitudes it displays towards religion, women and the idealism of the young. 

A New Recipe For Old Scraps

The genius of Gob Squad’s Kitchen is in its ability to provoke radically different interpretations. On one level, it is another formal exercise in testing the limits of the fourth wall: members of the audience gradually replace the players, and the use of a large screen, upon which the actions of the play are projected, highlights the expected division between stage and auditorium. On another, it’s a eulogy to the spirit of the 1960s, a close-up on the moment when the potential of the age was about to become a radical questioning of social and aesthetic values. And it is a complaint about the way in which this energy was dispersed, until the imaginative gestures of Warhol’s art became a series of mannered tropes, replacing the genuine inquisitive approaches with a series of recognisable strategies.

Gob Squad set out their idea quickly. They are going to recreate the filming of Warhol’s film, to get back into the state of mind that allowed the cast and crew to abandon the usual details of creativity – stuff like learning lines, or having a plot. There are several lengthy monologues that fake excitement for this past – usually with an undertow of anxiety and fear – and a couple of interludes that ponder how even getting sexy is fraught with irony, these days. At the height of the performance, the cast wig out, in a horribly rigid way, pretending that they are either at an orgy, or on LSD.

It is so terribly melancholic, with the overwhelming sense that the good times have long since disappeared. Knowing that the same people who were Warhol’s superstars went on to become casualties of their freedoms undermines an unabashed celebration of sex and drugs.

From this very self-conscious foundation, Gob Squad manage to come up with something original. By taking younger members of the audience to play them, they set up a delicious tension between their younger selves and their more knowing present identities. A woman questions her stand-in about the difficulties of balancing “the rock’n’roll lifestyle” with the desire for a stable family life. A man tries to fake hipness, only to have details of his real life beyond the stage revealed which deconstruct his veneer of cool. The constant play between “the real” and “the performed” undercuts both Warhol’s attempt to capture the authentic in art and Gob Squad’s journey back to an innocent time.

Most tellingly, Gob Squad use an apparent exercise in art archaeology to comment on cultural

anxiety. While the 1960s promoted the belief in change, its triumph only replaced one set of expectations with another. In particular, Warhol’s Factory was the nexus for a certain sort of experimentation, a social and artistic experimentation so successful that it became a bohemian establishment. Revolutions, both artistic and political, are exposed as a natural process that might change the surface details but can never depose the tyranny of time, which revolves the provocative into the predictable.

The various speeches appearing to praise the adventure of the 1960s are ironically the bitterest condemnations. Speculating on a future audience, which looks aback at the filmed moments as the origin of a brave new world, Gob Squad emphasis the failure of the experiment. The very performance they present, for all its wit, good humour, generosity and imagination, is, in itself, an almost ritualistic repetition of the past, another attempt to break free of influence, doomed to failure.