Dramaturgy Unseen: Natalie Arle-Toyne @ Oran Mor

Songs Unseen

Dates of show: 1st July 2016 Oran Mor, Glasgow, 2nd July HAC, irvine and 3rd July, Edinburgh Storytelling Centre

‘Songs Unseen’ follows on from the success of New Inck Theatre's 'Scenes Unseen', produced in association with the Tron Theatre Glasgow.

Scenes Unseen brought unseen work from Alan Ayckbourn, Patrick Marber and Athol Fugard together with new pieces from emerging Scottish writers. 

Capall Dorcha Theatre Company have teamed up with New Inck for 'Songs Unseen' which offers world premieres of songs from Tony Nominated Bill Russell and Janet Hood (Elegies for Angels, Punks and Raging Queens, Sideshow) and Oliver Award Winning Stiles and Drewe (Mary Poppins, Honk) sitting side-by-side with unseen songs from Scottish composer Karen MacIver (pianopiano) and lyricist John Cairney, Andrew Cruickshank (Bafta Scotland Award winner), Alan Penman, and emerging Scottish composers Finn Anderson (Streets) and Gus Gowland (Pieces of String).

Directed by Dr Donna Soto Morettini (Performance Coach for Andrew LLoyd Webber’s BBC shows, ‘I’d Do Anything’, ‘Over the Rainbow’ and ‘How Do You Solve A Problem Like Maria’; and Casting Director for ‘The Voice’), and featuring a stand-out cast including Natalie Arle-Toyne (Hairspray & Company), Barry Robertson (Closer Than Ever, The Mystery of Edwin Drood), Rosie Houlton, Neil Thomas (Little Shop of Horrors, Company) and Lauren Ellis-Steele (BBC's 6Degrees and Wicked No. 1 Tour).

What was the inspiration for this performance?

Songs Unseen was a natural next step for New Inck after a successful run of Scenes Unseen in association with The Tron Theatre, which brought world premieres from Alan Ayckbourn, Patrick Marber and Athol Fugard together with unseen work from emerging Scottish playwrights, and was called ‘a bold theatrical experiment that is also remarkably entertaining’ (Times ★★★★) and ‘A fascinating evening of theatre.’ (Scotsman ★★★★). 

Capall Dorcha Theatre Company and New Inck have joined forces with "Songs Unseen", which is being supported by Olivier Award winners Stiles and Drewe and Tony Nominees Bill Russell and Janet Hood.  We have some cracking never before seen songs spun together in a song cycle by director Dr Donna Soto-Morettini.

credit: Rae Mitchell

I know and sing for a lot of composers, musical theatre and otherwise, that are Scottish or Scottish-based and are not known outside of the Scottish theatrical circles.  This project is promoting and celebrating their work.  Some are established Scottish composers like Alan Penman and Karen McIver and some are emerging writers like Gus Gowland and Finn Anderson.

This short run is a launch for website  which will have composer/lyricist profiles and their sheet music and recordings from the show on sale.  

We want to know what the audience think of the material up for offer, so we can choose which pieces to move forward into research and development, hence the Q&A's after each performance. We want to build something with longevity, and do two of these a year to promote emerging composers and lyricists.

How did you go about gathering the team for it?

Artistic Director of Capall Dorcha Theatre Company, Barry Robertson, has been hankering on at me to get going with the project since I started talking about back in 2013.  He is passionate about new musical theatre and the perfect partner for Songs Unseen. 

Musical Director Stuart William Fleming, like Barry and me, wants to make new work happen in Scotland.  The three of us are teaming up to create the company Songs Unseen Ltd to make sure we keep this moving.  

The next logical step was to pick a director who has experience working with new musical theatre and were lucky enough to have Dr Donna Soto-Morettini agree to take on the role.  She has been an invaluable friend and advisor to me since I studied with her at the then RSAMD.  She is an incredible vocal coach and director, and I have never been more inspired or challenged than when she is in the room working with me.  

How did you become interested in making performance?

I am South African and studied to be an actor on a course that was driven by making new work.  There is nothing more exciting than watching a seed of an idea grow arms and legs and tentacles.  After I graduated, I was lucky enough to work with some great companies on classic texts, but I was also a part of a group of actors that wanted to continue to make some exciting new work of our own, which was just as well when paying for rights with the South African Rand was not cheap.  

With Scenes Unseen and Songs Unseen, I am a facilitator or collator of sorts. Rather than having made the work myself, my job is to pull together a cohesive evening of theatre and music.  

I performed in Bill Russell and Janet Hood's Elegies for Angels, Punks and Raging Queens for Insideout Productions in 2011 at the Tron.   It was then that Bill Russell and I got in contact and I later met him in NYC.  He is a wonderful, generous man and was surprised that there wasn't more Musical Theatre bring produced in Scotland.  His new show Everlasting Joy, written with his musical partner Janet Hood, will premiere in the Summer at Wellfleet on Cape Cod, Massachusetts.  We have the world premiere of three of the songs from that musical, and a never-before-seen gem from Stiles and Drewe, for our July launch show, which will attract a certain audience that may not have previously considered going to a new musical theatre evening, as well as the audience that is after new sounds.   

Was your process typical of the way that you make a performance?

It was similar to Scenes Unseen in that I first approached big names to see if they had unseen work they were willing to give to the project, which would sit beside Scottish composers that don't yet have an international presence, all to support emerging composers and lyricists here.  Creatives are always willing to help, the generosity never ceases to amaze me. 

Then I begin to build a team that will ensure quality production standards and the long haul begins.  I am actor with a passion for new work, and I've fallen into producing so I'm learning on the job.  It's hard work.

After the meetings with PRS and the Musicians Union to ensure we were looking after the composers as best we could, the writing of funding applications begin, then the marketing takes over, and just when you think you'll never see the inside of a rehearsal room again, the creative stuff starts to come together.  Director and musical director and producer meetings start to sew together a show and before you know it you're in a room devising monologue links and transitions with a bunch of talented charismatic people with voices to die for. 

What do you hope that the audience will experience?

Our composers include Alan Penman and lyricist Johnny McKnight, Karen McIver and lyricist John Cairney, Andrew Cruikshank, Gus Gowland, Finn Anderson, and of course Stiles and Drewe and Bill Russell and Janet Hood.  All of the songs are from different show ideas and there is an eclectic range of genres and styles.  Certain themes have sung out though, hence the idea of a song cycle which we're linking with short pieces of text.  I think each audience member will come away having seen a different show depending on what resonates with them.  

We have an incredible 5-strong cast of performers including the wonderful Neil Thomas (Little Shop of Horrors, Company), Lauren Ellis-Steele (BBCs 6Degrees and Wicked No.1 Tour), and Barry Robertson (The Mystery of Edwin Drood) and Rosie Houlton (Girls Night).

We want the audience to be a part of the process of choosing which show ideas move forward into research and development.  It's important that we are listening to the people supporting this new work so we bring back a full-scale musical that hits the ground running.

What strategies did you consider towards shaping this audience experience?

A range of voices was important so that the audience were hearing songs through different instruments. We toyed with adding some of the scenes from the unfinished shows the songs have been taken from, but then decided that it would make the evening too bitty.  

A song cycle, like "Songs From A New World" was the ideal model to use, where themes and relationships between characters are created and then shifted or dissolved.  We've added some short pieces of text to the song cycle but really we want the music to be central.  This gave us scope to play with the material given to create something cohesive, a complete theatrical showing.   

Do you see your work within any particular tradition?

New Musical Theatre evenings are popular in the U.S and down in London and are usually framed in an informal cabaret setting where performers chat a bit about each song before it's sung.  We want to format the evening differently so that the audience have a theatrical experience of these different songs sewn together into one cohesive show.  It still falls under Musical Theatre but it's new work from world-renowned composers and lyricists sitting alongside emergent Scottish writers. 

A Pint of Dramaturgy: Victoria Bianchi walks the CauseWay

CauseWay is based on a true story of Frances Parker and Ethel Moorhead, two suffragettes who, in 1914, cycled to the Robert Burns’ cottage armed with a mission and pipe bombs. 

From their first meeting to Ethel’s eventual

incarceration, it explores the story of two women, and of one cause that divided a nation. Weaving the songs of Burns together with the politics of the suffragettes, CauseWay invites us to join with Frances and Ethel in their journey towards a fairer world and asks whether, over 100 years later, we’ve arrived at our destination.

Victoria Bianchi, who trained at RCSSD, is a playwright and performer based in Glasgow. Her works have been performed at, amongst others, Summerhall (Edinburgh), The Arches (Glasgow), Buzzcut (Glasgow) and Camden People’s Theatre (London). She is currently the writer-in-residence for South Ayrshire, creating performance works for heritage sites. CauseWay is her first full-length work for Òran Mór.

What was the inspiration for this performance?
It was originally developed as a site-specific piece for the Robert Burns Birthplace Museum in Alloway in 2014. The outreach team at the museum wanted to present something as part of the WWI centenary that was a little different, and, as the attempted bombing had happened just before the war began, it seemed like the perfect story to tell. 

When I started working on the piece, I found the story really interesting, but I think my real inspiration came from this gap of 100 years. The main thing I wanted to ask with the play was how far we have come, in terms of equality, in that time.

How did you go about gathering the team for it?
I talked with Susie (Armitage) a fair bit about developing a new version of the work for A Play, A Pie and A Pint. We talked about how this performance, where site had been so crucial, could work in a space like Òran Mór. After the play was programmed, we discussed potential directors and decided to bring Debbie Hannan on board. 

This all happened very close to Christmas time, so there was definitely a sense that it had to be cast quickly given that we were going into rehearsal on 11th of January. Debbie is based in London, so we were emailing constantly about different casting options. We decided on Stephanie McGregor and Beth Marshall, who are both fantastic actors but also so incredibly engaged and enthusiastic about the issues in the piece. 

Working with a really passionate team is fantastic because as a writer you invest so much in the story, so it’s brilliant for the entire team to be so invested too.

How did you become interested in making performance.
I think I was about 6 when I went to my first drama class and after that there was never really anything else I wanted to do. At first I wanted to be an actor but as I went through university I became more drawn to devising contemporary performance. 

I think that, like most people in their late teens/early twenties, I was engaging more with  political ideologies and current affairs; I had left my little childhood bubble. The more I learned about the world, the more I wanted to say and the more I wanted to create. I wasn’t inspired by performing other people’s words any more; I wanted to put my own words out there.

Was your process typical of the way that you make a performance?
My process has developed a fair bit in the past four years. After I finished my MA I created a few solo performance works, before starting to focus more on playwriting in recent years. I suppose, though, the way I create work is still similar; it always starts with words.

I’m never sure of what will happen in any performance, so I just sit down at my computer and just start to type. I begin with what feels most important in that moment, with the scene that is the most fully-formed in my head, and the narrative grows from there.

What do you hope that the audience will experience?
While the work is not a promenade piece, I hope that the audience feel a sense of the journey of these characters. I mean this in a metaphorical and literal sense, because they did cycle for almost 40 miles to try to blow up Burns Cottage. 

Sometimes we find ourselves so far from where we began that we’re not sure how we got there, and that’s a really important element of this play. As Ethel and Frances make their way towards their destination, I want the audience to understand how they got there, and to think about how far we are now from where they were then.

What strategies did you consider towards shaping this audience experience?
I’m a great believer in drawing the audience in with humour before finding a way to break their hearts a little; make them laugh until they cry. This story is not particularly funny, but I thought it was important to find the humour in it, and to find an accessible side to the characters.

I think A Play, A Pie and A Pint is such a special space for performance, it’s intimate and friendly, and I wanted to bring a sense of that into my script. The audience are addressed directly as attendees at different rallies and , in the final scene, jurors in a courtroom. In this way, they are implicated in the story and will hopefully be able to relate more easily to the characters.

Do you see your work within any particular tradition?
I think CauseWay has a real folk element to it; it uses music and poetry to tell the story, and it’s a very Scottish play. I suppose I want to bring this cosy, traditional style of performance together with much more radical, polemic work. 

I love contemporary performance, I love the anger and the urgency, and I want to bring that to my work within a more traditional model of playwriting. I wouldn’t say that I always try to have a message in the work that I make, but it’s always a response to something I’m dissatisfied with. After all, doesn’t all the best artistic work come from some form of anger?

Ali Bawbag and the Four Dramaturgies: Gary McNair talks panto

Christmas Panto
Ali Bawbag and the Four Tealeafs
Mon, 30 November, 2015 — Wed, 23 December, 2015
By Dave Anderson and Gary McNair

Featuring Dave Anderson, George Drennan, Frances Thorburn and Anita Vettesse

Ali is a very poor man, with a brother who is wealthy. He also has a wife who looks, let’s face it, like a man. One day, Ali is in the woods – don’t ask – when he sees a (budget) band of robbers. 

The leader says a magic password and a boulder rolls away from a rock face. Ali discovers, after they’ve gone, a cave full of riches, and his life is never the same again. A strange tale unfolds, involving Ali’s greedy brother, his aspirational wife, the band of robbers, and more besides.

Drennan and trumpet

Òran Mór’s annual Christmas Panto for grown-up children has become a not to miss Festive Season comedy treat. Join us this December for Dave Anderson and Gary McNair’s irreverent take on Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves. Boo, cheer and sing-along, Oh, yes you will!


How did you get involved in this PPP panto business?
Gary McNair: I’ve got a good relationship with the guys at PPP. I had my very first commission their with Crunch and I’ve gone on to write and direct several other pieces for them. I’m also a part of the group the DM collective, founded by David MacLennan,  we create political satire shows there every year or so. 

It was through this that I first got to work with the wonderful Dave Anderson, we’ve really got a lot out of working together on those shows and from there, he invited me in to collaborate with him on the writing process for the summer Panto which was a real honour and a great laugh so, thankfully, he’s asked me back along.  


Will you be performing in it? After all you’re known as a monologist who performs his own scripts.
Oh no I won’t! 

I know that I’m perhaps more known to people as someone who performs my own scripts, but I tend to only do that once a year and so I save performing for the projects that I feel are right for me to do or the stories that I feel that only I could tell. But for the rest of the year, I create shows for other people to perform, which I enjoy just as much as performing. I really love the art of writing. 

I love getting to craft a story and watching other people bring it to life. Also, I can’t sing for toffee so I wouldn’t unleash that agony on a paying public. 

Were you a panto fan growing up?
Not massively. But that’s only because I never really went to any. Our school didn’t do any panto trips as far as I remember so it never really got into my blood in the way that it has for other people. It was only in later years, and, actually it was through watching the panto’s at Oran Mor, that I realised that it’s such a brilliant medium for satire and social commentary which is right up my street. 

Show seems more aimed at adults is that a statement about panto’s potential as a more mature entertainment?
I guess it is a little more adult, yes. But not in a Jim Davidson way. Far from it. I think that, yes, panto has the potential to be mature entertainment, but I think that’s always the case. When you go and see the best ones like Johnny McKnight’s or Brian James’, for example, they’re working on multiple levels; the kids love it because it works for them but the adults are hooked in as well on big laughs that are perhaps going over the kids heads, kind of like the Simpsons in that manner.

Panto’s always have so many themes relevant to everyone; hardship suffered by the poor, greed versus good, the toppling of evil empires, I think if the show was particularly mature in anyway, I guess it would be that with the knowledge that it is a venue that has a more mature audience as well, we’re freed up a little more to push these themes more to the direct political reference to what’s going on the world and so we’re able ramp up the satire a little. It’s also very very silly. 

That’s the joy of writing it with Dave, his comic timing is exceptional and he has real integrity in his work too because he cares a great deal about the world. And it helps that we can have a bloody good swear into the bargain. 

Is the show set in Glasgow? Will there be familiar characters to those of us that hang around the west end?
It’s set in panto land, of course. But it is peculiar how similar panto land can be to Glasgow at times.

Gary in his previous Xmas show...

Meanwhile at the Oran Mor

Broth@ PPP: a Few Thoughts

CHORALE: A SAM SHEPARD ROADSHOW

Sam Shepard is hardcore. He was in that film Voyager, about needed to be a bit more careful about his sexual partners. He wrote Paris, Texas and recently did his first ever post-show session at The Citizens, where somebody asked him whether there were any DVD box-sets that he would recommend.

Ah, Glasgow audiences are the most sophisticated in the world. 

Now, there is a roadshow doing the rounds dedicated to him. It's like his work can't be contained by the usual theatrical presentations. It's a mixture of performance, film and workshops, with live music, and it all started when Ben Kritikos (out of Herons!) and Jack Talton (the one who played Mozart on the BBC) were pulled together with Simon Usher (artistic director of Coventry Belgrade) to create a new work based on Shepard's prose and poetry. Making the Sound of Loneliness was then commissioned by Latitude Festival in 2012 (I think that was the year my tent was swept away in the night), and has inspired Actors Touring Company to hit the road with a sack full of Shepard shenanigans.

There is so much going on that I got a little confused by the press release. I think all the genres are being The Animal (You)... no, they are 'staging two further pieces by Sam Shepard, the visceral early play The Holy Ghostly and the poetic monologue The War in Heaven and a screening of the rarely seen film version of Savage/Love, directed by Academy Award winning director Shirley Clarke.'

slapped into a single piece, called

'The workshop will focus on another little seen film by Clarke, Tongues. As The War In Heaven was co-written with actor Joseph Chaikin who was left with Aphasia, there will be additional workshops and outreach activity in partnership with Connect, a charity for people living with Aphasia, to create awareness of this language disorder.'

The Holy Ghostly is vintage Shepard: out in the desert, a father and son duke it out. It does sum up why some people might find it a bit much: he isn't just a male writer, he is always banging on about masculinity - and it tends to be the rough'n'tough variety. That said, artists have no moral responsibility to be balanced, and his virtuosic word-play (and the inherent theatricality of his scripts) get him off the hook.

There is one other great thing about this roadshow. Back to the press release: Ben Kritikos creates a badland soundscape for all the shows and will also play post-show gigs while on tour with Presence Theatre.

That'll be my cross-platform button ticked. Score...

PRESENCE THEATRE LTD. & ACTORS TOURING COMPANY IN ASSOCIATION WITH BELGRADE THEATRE COVENTRY PRESENT CHORALE A SAM SHEPARD ROADSHOW ! UK SPRING TOUR 10TH MAY–4TH JULY 2014

CHORALE Directed by Simon Usher Design by Carmen Mueck Lighting & Projection Arnim Friess Sound Design Paul Bull Music by  Cast John Chancer, Valerie Gogan and Jack Tarlton

Belgrade Theatre, Coventry 10th–17th May (show times vary) 024 7655 3055 www.belgrade.co.uk

Rhoda McGaw Theatre, Woking 23rd and 24th May, 7.30pm 01483 545999
www.atgtickets.com/venues/rhoda- mcgaw-theatre

Òran Mór, Glasgow 28th May, 7.30pm 0141 357 6200 www.oran-mor.co.uk

Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh 30th and 31st May, 7.30pm 0131 228 1404 www.traverse.co.uk

The Poly, Falmouth 5th June, 7.30pm 01362 3194 www.thepoly.org

The Acorn, Penzance 6th June, 7.30pm 01736 363545 www.theacornpenzance.com

Eden Court Theatre, Inverness 12th and 13th June, 8pm 01463 234 234 www.eden-court.co.uk

CLF Art Café at the Bussey Building, London 16th–29th June (show times vary) 020 7732 5275 www.clfartcafe.org

Dugdale Art Centre, Enfield 3rd and 4th July 2014, 8pm 0208 807 6680 www.dugdale.co.uk

Home at The Oran Mor

Previous production from PPP

Being the champion of the experimental, the painfully hip and the downright challenging, I'd like to disrespect Oran Mor's Play, Pie and a Pint. Now that I have found out that the theatre which has inspired me over the past decade has a category (it's called post-dramatic), I am all set to attack the very idea that a script is the foundation of theatre.

Unfortunately, I can't argue PPP. It offers a new play every week, pretty much, and has had plenty of shows move onto bigger tours. It has given Scotland new works by David Harrower and Rona Munro. It even hosted a few of my own post-dramatic heroes (Monfrooe, McNair). It's a good thing. I have to silence my angst-ridden post-modern trickiness, and salute the audience - loyal - the producers - persistent -  and the artistic director - the best Omar Sharif impersonator north of Manchester.

The following press release is another example of why PPP  is a good thing. It arrived from Edinburgh University.

 Writing student takes centre stage, with a pie and pint on the side

A playwriting student has won a new prize to have her work performed as part of a popular lunchtime theatre programme. Jenny Knotts from the University of Edinburgh has been awarded the inaugural David MacLennan Prize for her play, Home. It will be showcased in Glasgow theatre Oran Mor’s long-standing series, A Play, a Pie and a Pint.

Jenny’s winning piece is a comedy tinged with sadness, centring on twin sisters Maggie and Agnes’ last day in a house that has been their home for decades. Maggie suffers from Alzheimer’s and Agnes uses a wheelchair.The twins are from Ireland and their voices are inspired by Jenny’s own grandmother.

I am restraining myself from suggesting that the characters were inspired by Oran Mor's audience. 


Jenny was moved to write Home after watching a documentary about the care of elderly people in Scotland. Jenny said: “Winning the David MacLennan Prize is a dream come true – I have been going to see plays at Oran Mor for years and know how important it is to the Scottish theatre scene. I think it is so generous of them to support a new writer like myself with a fully commissioned play, and I can’t wait to see where this takes me.”

David MacLennan is an acclaimed Artistic Director at Oran Mor who champions new writing – producing more than 30 weeks of new plays every year. He initiated the new award exclusively with the University of Edinburgh, offering Postgraduate students in Playwriting the opportunity to have their work performed as part the renowned theatre series.

I am hoping that MacLennan has a look round the corner of Byres Road later this year: there are a bunch of immensely talented playwrights up at Glasgow this year, on the Playwriting and Dramaturgy course. I've heard a rumour that one of the writers has written a twenty minute tragedy called 'Trigger Warning.'



David said: “We are delighted to produce Home at Oran Mor – Jenny’s distinctive voice is unlike any I have heard before and I think our audiences will really enjoy it. The calibre of the students’ writing was incredibly high this year and it was a challenge to choose a winner. Moreover, the partnership with the University has been a success and we hope it continues.”

Jenny is a student on the University of Edinburgh’s MSc in Playwriting, led by award-winning playwright Nicola McCartney. The programme aims to give its students real experience in Scotland’s theatre scene.



Jenny Knott’s Home will be performed in Oran Mor at 1pm from 25-30 November. Tickets can be purchased here:

The Jazz Club Murder

It is sadly appropriate that I am reading the assembled criticism of Kenneth Tynan in the same week that I have seen Oran Mor’s The Jazz Club Murder.  While the Murder has the well-mannered aplomb of a mildly ironic drawing room drama – despite the setting, the detective-vicar never loses his Oxbridge charm – it subscribes to a set of values that would, no doubt, have had Tynan plotting to become the first man to say ‘fuck’ on the BBC, thereby setting a bomb under post-war civil society.

There’s some fine trumpet-playing by George Drennan – a man given to whipping out his horn at any excuse, even when playing a pantomime baddie, a winning performance from Paul Dodds as the heroic priest, and even a sexy dual turn from Frances Thorburn, who plays the seductive American singer and teasing society mademoiselle with equal restraint. But from its structure  - mild investigation followed by almost dramatic revelation – to its underlying morality (vengeance corrupts the soul), Mr Runcie’s drama is comfortingly predictable.

To complain that it sentimentalises an era – the 1950s – is to miss the point: the drama depends on stock characters rubbing along happily. The murderer is barely glimpsed before the final scenes – preventing any possible shock or sympathy – allowing the play’s wit to rest on the vicar’s flirtations with the toothsome twosome. Undeniably, it goes for the easy path to the audience’s affection – the packed crowd laughed willingly at the strained jokes stolen from Mae West.

Yet the light irony it beings to its depiction of a London of jazz clubs and underworld villainy lacks any satirical bite: Murder is an entertainment, a light one, that ignores the tragedy of an innocent killed before her time or the journey of her killer from loyal son to condemned criminal. It signifies a past long forgotten, evoking the era more through the mannered conversations and the simplicities of plot: it rarely threatens to reveal the depth of the characters, even preferring to have fun at the expense of the cast’s changes of role.

Moments of fun abound – aside from an unfortunate misuse of the word ‘ball’ (is the jazz singer really asking the vicar to have sex with her, because that is what the word means. Ask Little Richard…), and the repeated phrase ‘catching the milk train back to Cambridge’ which sounds suspiciously like a euphemism after the heroic vicar has spent the evening with two different women – there’s a lively humour in the vicar’s commentary on events. Slight missteps in tone – some of the jazz numbers have a little too much of the Whitney Houston hysteria to convince – are quickly absorbed into a straightforward, facile plot. Drennan, although given little to do, is always charismatic: Doodad wins over the audience and acts both as plucky protagonist and obedient narrator.

But even by PPP’s conservative standards, Murder is whimsical. It seems churlish to attack so slight a piece of theatre (and this is neither tragedy, nor drama), especially since it aims to entertain. Yet Tynan’s ghost haunts me: like Aristotle, like Plato, he recognised the power of theatre as a moral force, as disruptive, as challenging. There’s nothing wrong with The Jazz Club Murder, beyond the occasional dodgy accent. But it isn’t enough.

The Trouble With Double

Morality, of course, remains in fashion. The triumphs against the repressive models of moral stricture - such as censorship of the theatre (1968), Clause 28 (rather later than it ought to have been, frankly) - haven't removed the necessity of moral limitations on the arts, but shifted the grounds. While once the representation of homosexuality was either prohibited or satirical - it isn't that simple to reclaim John Inman as subversive - arguments about attitudes towards gender or sexual identity remain dynamic.

It is, however, less fashionable to critique a play on the grounds that it is morally obnoxious. That kind of talk harks back to the complaints of St Augustine (who saw theatre as a distraction from God) or The Daily Mail, which would probably worry about the impact on the children: either that, or it's political correctness gone mad.

I'm probably political correctness gone mad: certainly, my moral parameters are unrecognisable to conservative values. I'd rather see Empress Stah get naked and drink her own blood than see an actress in bra and panties during a lunchtime play - although I can see how, if the matter is simply 'area of flesh exposed,' Stah must appear more immoral.

And finally, I get to The Trouble With Double. It's part of the Oran Mor's A Play, A Pie and A Pint season. I'm not sure whether to begin with the good things or the bad things. The bad thing is that I would, in fact, ban this play - or at least this production of it.

(Of course, I wouldn't really ban anything. I am committed to a liberal anti-censorship argument: liberal in the sense it is vague. I don't begrudge the cast and crew getting paid, I don't begrudge the audience the cheap laughs or the vulgar titillation. The problems that I have with D.c. Jackson's script aren't really that is represents a serious threat to morality or social order.)

Let's start with the good. D.C. Jackson might be the closest thing that Scottish theatre has to a poet - in terms of word wielding, Jackson has the same fluid facility that marks Russell Brand out from the cornucopia of comics, a dizzying command of alliteration and the well framed phrase and fable. Like a poet, Jackson bombs on the punchlines - many of the gags require only a blast from a trombone to become more obvious than the Conservative Party's duplicity. But he can sling words around the stage with the energy of a cage full of chimpanzees flinging faeces.

And Kenny Miller can direct up a story. Trouble never relaxes, keeps the pace fiercer than Beyonce: despite the weakness of the plot's premise (yes, it's an identical twins farce), it moves sleekly to the inevitable resolution.

Johny Austin and Robert Jack and Louise McCarthy do the business on stage. Jack is a geeky sex-pest, not without charm. Austin is the timid groom to be. McCarthy gets to play both limpid wife and sexpot sister.

If as Aristotle says, the plot is more important than the characters, and both are more important than the ideas therein, Trouble  might get a pass. Sadly, Jackson wasn't too fussed about characterisation. All three actors are playing off the shelf personalities, and when McCarthy strips down to her skidders, a horrible truth is revealed.

This is a pilot for a 1970s sit-com that never happened. The ingredients are all in place: the men are hopeless, driven by insecurity or sexual opportunism. The women are either malicious and sexual or prim and demanding. So much talent is wasted on something that Sid James might lend an ironic bite. To the left, we have a scene from the action. Feminists are quite justified in taking this as a reading for the show's temperature. They are also correct to ask why the woman is dressed in an erotic manner and the man... do I have to be PC Gone Mad to object to this?

It is a sex comedy that is neither erotic nor self-aware. It is dated, trivial and, when it relies on the jokes in the script (that is, when cast or director aren't pushing the funny by their performances), it is like a saucy postcard source book.

Now the critic decides: am I to moralise, or judge the play on its performance? If the former, then PPP are banished beyond the city walls, until they can be more mature about sexuality. If the later, they ought to get a raise.

Chalk Farm

A: Reckon it's well soon to be writin' about the riots in London... could be a bit bleedin' previous to have some faces from Glasgow tryin' to comment on somethin' happenin' in yer own manor... I dunno.

B:It's not like the riots aren't symptomatic of a deeper cultural malaise, and expression, if you will, of the seething discontent at the injustices of the Conservative - Liberal Democrat government. And within the broader, international context, it stands comparison with other spontaneous, and violent uprisings. Why, it is even a cliché on the left wing to question why the riots in Syria were seen as revolutionary, while the ones in London were written off as mere thuggery.

A: Yeah, right. I was up in the Weeg when it all kicked off - had a bit of business to sort. All I remember is these Jocks laughin' at it and sayin' how they wouldn't riot, just to prove they were better than the English. Besides, this wasn't a political thin'. It was a good laugh an' all.

B: I think that Chalk Farm makes an effort to go beyond the simplistic readings of the tabloid headlines. Both of the characters - mother and son - acknowledge the way that the rioters were demonised and although justice is served - of a sort - at the end, the script has a great compassion for those caught in the spiral of poverty, bad housing and social stigma.

A: Still, I dunno. It's well limitin' to only have two actors to try at get at the thin'. Like, it was all races an' that out on the street, all ages. An' in under an hour, it's tough enough to get beyond yer basic assumptions. I wasn't buying the young lad as an informed observer- like his muvver said, he's just a kid. I dunno. It worries me when you ascribe meanin' to actions that the geezer doing 'em don't have. Makes humans into little more than animals.

B: In a structuralist context - which the orthodoxies of Marxist and left wing thought unconsciously cite - the individual is moved by the pressures of their context. Individualism is a romantic myth, and like all romantic myths, serves nicely to justify capitalist and conservative thinking. The mother and son in Chalk Farm are trapped by their environment... so the son's rebellion - which is against his mother as much as the state - can only be expressed in these terms.

The young man observes himself - or rather, his friend says to him that the riot is the inevitable consequence of a system that defines the individual by what they own, then fails to provide the income that allows large parts of the population to own very much.

A: Right. So the big ruckus wasn't just about lootin' some stuff: the stuff was a symbol of what the underclass are wantin'. Pretty shit, that: the best they can think of gettin' is shit out of a supermarket.

B: I think that is part of the problem that Chalk Farm is trying to address. I think the authors are toying with the tension between personal responsibility and a more collective understanding of culpability. At the end, when the mother assumes the guilt for her son's behaviour, it is ambiguous. Is she simply accepting the tabloid - and David Cameron's - insistence that the parents are to blame?

A: Or has she come over all Jesus? I didn't like that... and all that about the pink fizz. She liked a drink, that mum. And her kid goes and rips off some booze for her. So maybe she is guilty. If she hadn't been on the sauce, maybe they could have had a bit of quality time.

B: Once you start to examine the script, it has a more complex intention and a subtle tension between competing versions of what the riots meant.

A: You say that as if you ain't sure.

B: I am concerned that there were places where it was sentimental - the mother's love perhaps, or the vision of the young lad as basically decent. It certainly lays out the abstract issues around the riots, but I cannot be sure that it grapples with the reality of the event.

A: You are sayin' that the analysis could be applied to any violent uprising and the conservative response? Like I said, maybe it's too soon.

B: And maybe a more authentic voice might come from the manor where it all happened. I am not sure... perhaps the arguments felt too familiar. It's compassionate, but a little condescending. It offers a way into the discussion, and refuses to have an easy resolution but the basic conflicts - mother and son, government and estate, rich and poor, tabloids and reality - are in danger of being reduced to a series of abstract ideals.