Brothers Karamazov at the Tron 2017

Sue Glover on The Straw Chair

When you were writing The Straw Chair, what made you go for a historical story - one of the characteristics of your work is an active engagement with contemporary issues - does the past allow you to do this in a particular manner?

I mainly look for character, sometimes an incident/predicament, but it’s the characters that grab me. I think I've interpreted Rachel correctly, and I've made the ‘servant’ female, and the wife very young, and the minister a good bit older, and I love these characters. I never really saw it as ‘costume drama’. 

The play is about the different aspects of marriage (Rachel’s, Isabel’s and the Minister’s, even Oona’s) and also about hypocrisy. Massive hypocrisy. These things are always relevant. There are men like Lord Grange in public life today, one who was in very high office in Europe hit the headlines big time a while back. 

Has much changed in the context for the play in the past twenty years? Are the issues, especially for women, similar?

It’s about the problem – or the solution - of ‘uncomfortable’ women being ‘tidied away’. Rachel was by no means the only ‘disappeared wife’, although she is the only one to have had three funerals. The Victorians were a dab hand at it. Think of Camille Claudel. 

Women, and girls, were still being shut away on the orders of men – male relatives, priests, even into the 1950s, in the laundries of convents and reform schools. 

Which doesn’t make Rachel, Lady Grange, a less impossibly awful character, but it does make her pitiable.

Theatre , dialogue, character are just so interesting. You’d have much more control over a novel....but the play’s the thing.

I regard you as one of the playwrights who kick-started Scottish scripted theatre - do you feel that there is anything about your writing that identifies...

Writing as Scottish? It’s not something I would think about, although when I started writing I felt out on a limb being ‘East Coast’. It seemed to me as if all the Scottish radio/theatre/telly was dominated by the West (i.e. Glasgow!) 

 I actually thought I was kind of doomed. (I didn’t really notice that there were almost no women writers around; there were other problems: like travelling from East Fife, babysitters, not coming from a theatre background, not knowing the jargon. In short being an outsider. Which is fine.)

Six Acts of Love @ Tron, 2008

Andy Arnold continues to move and care at the Tron.
EVENT REVIEW BY GARETH K VILE.
PUBLISHED IN THE SKINNY 12 OCTOBER 2008

Six Acts of Love has a strong script, searching characterisation and a simple, yet effective staging. Andy Arnold’s direction is swift and terse, while Ioanna Anderson’s script features a sharp eye for realism and bursts of banter. Entertaining and precise, the plot is slightly forced towards to end – no doubt to ensure appropriate dramatic closure and allow the correct number of resonant scenes – it studies the challenges of aging from different angles, ultimately offering the sort of hope that only ever happens in fiction.

Katherine (Barbara Wilshere), a newly separated middle-aged woman, finds herself caring for her senile mother, and reflects on the ravages of time and trauma. In a plot that lurches from staged incident to quiet reflections, Katherine gradually comes to a deeper understanding of herself, discovers hope and finally love.

All of the performances are strong and capable - Una McLean captures something of the despair and humour of dementia, and Benny Young somehow brings a dignity to the role of the abandoning husband. The compassion that Anderson’s script offers to each character is moving and brave. There are no villains, only individuals trying to deal with circumstance. It is unfortunate that the narrative feels so forced that it undermines the passionate reunion of the final act of love.

Well acted, engaging ideas, a steady pace: Six Acts of Love is enjoyable and edges towards profound, relevant meditations on love, age and survival. Where it draws conclusions, it is predictable, and there is a sense that the characters are deliberately being given turns in the spot-light, rather than developing together. Not sensational but kind, Six Acts of Love has a tentative hope that would be more credible if the plot was not so jerky.

A Public Apology - The Tron's Open Stage and Ankur's Social Rage

BLOG POST BY GARETH K VILE.
PUBLISHED IN THE SKINNY 17 OCTOBER 2010


My misgivings about The Tron’s Open Stage competition – that the public vote would ensure mawkish, safe drama ­ - are squashed by Sea and Land and Sky. My defence - its online trailer suggested a more conventional take on World War I - can’t escape that LASAS harks back to the vicious theatre of Edward Bond, Howard Barker and even the blessed Sarah Kane.

If the final scene is disappointingly sentimental, and the odd line smacks of historical research bubbling to the surface (“fifty seven thousand men die in the first two hours,” indeed), Abigail Docherty’s script is admirably uncompromising in its presentation of the psychological impact of violence. Scattered body parts, desperate humping amidst the carnage, corpses embraced and wounds self-inflicted: Docherty’s portrayal of psychological disintegration in the face of World War I’s horrors is unflinching.

There are moments in Andy Arnold’s direction that lift the action beyond the immediate violence into an abstract absurdism: Tyler Collins gives his philosophical deserter an overdone gravity, while a disembodied head expresses a desire to die old and horny. The dead soldiers carried about by the deranged nurse could have done with a little more weight, and the collection of body parts slips towards slapstick.

With a solid set that doubles as trench and endless road through fields of slaughter, LASAS is nasty theatre, uneasily between naturalism and a symbolism. This is difficult theatre: the dry delivery gradually gives way to hysteria, and it is a challenge for the show to live up to the extremity of the script’s themes and episodes. Yet its message is familiar: war is hell. Even Paul Riley’s working-class romanticism can’t transcend the brutal rending of flesh and hope.

Towards the end, the script betrays a lack of confidence, bringing in domestic murder to add to the pathos: whether the revelation that one nurse committed matricide is an attempt to show the universality of savagery or a late plot twist is debatable. However, I do accept that this made for a more engrossing victor of Open Stage than my own entry, the burlesque Greek Tragedy.

Playback, over in the Briggait and the latest community-focussed project from Ankur, is very much youth theatre gone tough. Bigg Taj rocks the mic, young actors play gang members and the story is a hip-hop variation of the struggle between good and evil social impulses. The competing stories don’t always mesh effectively – Taj’s narrative only becomes relevant in the last moments, and feels like an after-thought finale just to prove how bad the bad boys really are, but it is exciting to be ushered around the Briggait’s cold storage spaces and see how community theatre is attempting to take on the challenge of both physical and site-responsive theatre.

Since the play is set in the places where I live and socialise, the question of authenticity becomes vital. There’s a slight sense that the script is spelling out the tension, using almost stereotypical notions of communities and gangsters, yet the theatrical presentation of Glasgow South’s street youth is recognisable and chilling. Ankur still haven’t quite found their voice - the integration of local detail and the archetypal narrative isn’t complete, but it does feel as if their fusion of community work and ambitious productions is a leading edge within Scottish theatre.

Theatre Venue of the Month: Tron

More than a theatre

FEATURE BY GARETH K VILE.

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED IN THE SKINNY 01 OCTOBER 2010

When Andy Arnold moved from The Arches to The Tron, he was arriving at a very different theatre to the one he left. While The Arches has a reputation for new work, and an atmosphere that converts every show into a site responsive extravaganza, The Tron has a classic theatrical arch and has drifted between the populist and the experimental.

Arnold has not so much redirected the Tron as find a surer balance between the populist and experimental: the return of DC Jackson's popular dysfunctional family in The Chucky Brae this year has been countered by an increased use of the smaller Changing House for a series of challenging plays, while his Mayfesto was a brave attempt to revive an old Glasgow festival with a political edge.

Equally, The Tron has been open to outside influence: the competition in association with the NTS, Open Stage, may not have found Many new voices, but it has led to the development of three new plays from established authors – including CATS award winner Rob Drummond –  and winner Sea and Land and Sky from Abigail Doherty, which is premiered this month.

Directed by Arnold himself, SLS looks back to WWI for a story of love, loss and dark humour. Although Arnold did not select the winner himself, the play has the classic Arnold combination. Fascinated by sparse, terse scripts – he is a master director of Beckett – it has a strong cast, an emotive background and the potential for serious dialogue and revelatory climaxes, plus the guy who played Winston in Still Game, Paul Riley.

Dirty Paradise, a monologue based on a story by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, is a fine example of how Arnold has opened up the building to other groups: it is part of The Scottish Mental Health Arts and Film Festival, and directed by Alison Peebles. Peebles, fresh from David Leddy's Sub Rosa and currently working on Panic Patterns for Glasgay! has a good claim to be the hardest working women in Scottish performance: this one hander, that deals in magic realism and hallucination, is both written and performed by Leann O'Kasi, who superbly directed the thrilling Top Dog/Under Dog at the Citizens last year.

The smaller spaces at the Tron are equally open to exciting events: the Victoria Bar regularly hosts The Supper Club Cabaret, alongside Club Sublime – led by Blind Girl and the Crips, this monthly special is curated by the ever imaginative Sounds of Progress – with Lost in Digression joining them from October. Dedicated to anti-heroes, riot grrls, nancy boys and anyone who has never quite managed to find their way back, Lost is a salon for the post-burlesque cabaret.

As the latest posters advertising the season suggest, the Tron is attempting to be far more than just a theatre: the various rehearsed readings, the arrival of Traverse hit Midsummer and the visits from community poetry slammers Word Factory all combine to generate an atmosphere of constant activity and creativity. It may not be The Arches in audience or intention, or atmosphere and continuity, but Arnold's Tron is finding a logical direction for a traditional theatre space to break the mould.

My Name is.. @ Tron

Heart @ The Tron

Heart @ The Tron

Pitching for Fun and Horror

It is perhaps no accident that the rise of the British neo-brutalists (Kane, Ridley, Ravenhill et al) during the 1990s coincided with the last years of the Conservative government. After all the excitement of Thatcher, who pulled the post-war consensus towards a libertarian capitalism, the period under John Major managed to be both boring and corrupt. Eventually, New Labour came along and booted their arses, before descending into a mini-pops version of their historical nemeses.

Saint Sarah Kane did her best to break through the monotony to expose the horror beneath with some of the most shocking images ever presented on the British stage (and this is a tradition that includes Bond's stoning babies to death (Saved), Barker's civil war rape and execution special (Victory)). Philip Ridley is more subtle. He presents a hyper-reality that feels trapped between the dole culture of London and the aftermath of a future apocalypse, his characters more either glamorous psychotics or addicted shut-ins. The horror isn't in the body, it is all in your head...

And so, The Pitchfork Disney comes to The Tron. Director Eve Nicol is clearly a fan: 'Ridley is a greatly underappreciated writer,' she says. 'He's frequently produced in London but who needs more champions in Scotland.' Taking on his debut play - sometimes seen as the herald of British neo-brutalism - is no simple task, for the artists and the audience.

She continues: 'His lyrical barbarism can be real Marmite work - you’ll love it or hate it.' Even the name, a jarring juxtaposition of happy and brutal, provokes confusion. Beginning with the paranoid arguments of a pair of twins (adult, but stuck in an infantile obsession with safety and sweeties), it takes the post-apocalyptic scenario darker and deeper when Cosmo Disney turns up, like a satanic Godot, with his own kinky enforcer in tow.

'The Pitchfork Disney is an attractive piece for actors, huge characters with spectacular names, appearances and identities, but it is also demanding,' Nicol adds. 'All the cast have their own “party piece:” extended monologues that pop up out of the text, including a nightmarish ten minute post-apocalyptic fantasy. The play is an hour and a half straight through with little relief for either the cast or audience. But once you've worked your way through to the other end of the tickles and terror, it is deeply rewarding.'


The terror and tickles aren't just fancy technique: Ridley is a relentlessly sincere writer. 'His distinctive voice comes from a place of honesty and is fuelled by love for people and their survival instinct,' Nicol concludes. 'Ridley’s stories make your heart beat faster. You come out feeling more human and alive than you went in.'

STITCHING BY ANTHONY NEILSON

I might as well admit that I have a bad attitude towards Anthony Neilson's scripts: while I acknowledge that he can be witty, satirical and bawdy, he fell foul of my obsession with the representation of mental illness in The Wonderful World of Dissocia. I know that I am in a minority here - it has won awards from the CATS, it has been restaged and lauded. However, it's a rare moment when Michael Billington and I agree: the mental illness on display was merely a fantastic plot device and did nothing to forward realistic or sympathetic portrayals of mental ill-health. 

But Stitching  is about  how "Stu and Abby try to pick up the pieces of their relationship, but they only end up picking it apart, stitch by painful stitch." A heteronormative couple in conflict and pain? Count me in, obviously. 

Stitching has been banned in several countries - another plus - and the Tron are warning that it is not for the easily offended. Producer and star of the production, Catriona Evans says that “This play is very challenging, even for a theatre-savvy audience. It deals with the painful and perverse lengths to which people go to keep a broken relationship alive. People may not want to admit it, may be offended, may think Neilson is an extremist, but we feel he has the courage to tell the truth and show us the darker parts of love without flinching.”

I'm in.

TUE 9 – THU 11 APRIL 2013, 8pm

The Tron

COME ON YOU HORNS

I love football.

I went to my first match in about twenty years over Christmas (I was the guest of the rather wonderful Ian Smithson, who re-introduced me to Watford FC, the team of my childhood). Apart from my sudden transition into critical mode (I was so focussed on the continental skills of the midfield, I could not speak), I reacquainted myself with the joy of sport.

As a child, I followed Watford from division four to the FA Cup final. It was Roy of The Rovers stuff: same old story, team from nowhere. Plus we had Luther Blissett, who would give his name to an Italian anarchist collective. It was difficult to care about other teams after seeing this happen. However, under their new manager, Watford have become a "champagne football" side, and I am back on the terraces.

Only the terraces don't exist. Luckily, I went to school with Ian Grant, who is one of the most talented football writers of my generation. 

I am even luckier. Just as I get back into football, Ridiculusmus are coming to the Tron with Total Football. It's theatre. It's about the beautiful game. David Woods and Jon Haynes are bringing the game to the stage.

In a show that better last ninety minutes, they cover the big questions. "immortality, happiness and why England always lose."

I think they might want to think about the last question when they perform in Scotland. They might be getting cheers for tears there. 

Anyway, Ridiculusmus has been going since 1992 , having experienced as many line up changes as Watford in their glory days. The Times, which knows about insanity, praised them for "making work that is both innovative and bonkers."

Of course, this isn't just about football (anymore than football is about kicking a ball about). It's about identity, national pride, big business and the quest for meaning. And they are going to explain the off-side rule. Frankly, the referee in that match at Christmas could do with the refresher...  

TOTAL FOOTBALL

The Tron, Glasgow

TUE 19 – SAT 23 MARCH 2013, 7.45pm