A Wee Home from Home

A pleasure from the past explains by omission how Glasgow has grown.

EVENT PREVIEW BY PHIL GATT.
PUBLISHED IN THE SKINNY 07 JANUARY 2010

Unsurprisingly for a revival of a twenty-year-old piece, A Wee Home from Home does feel slightly dated. Essentially a duet between musician Michael Marra and Frank McConnell, it dwells on Glasgow's reputation as both no mean city and welcome home, taking in slashings, loneliness and the finale in a "Scotch" sitting room of tartan and flashing lights.


Marra is a treat in himself: his rich voice has drawn comparisons with Tom Waits and his ability to capture a Scottish vernacular in song powers the production along, both melancholic and hopeful. McConnell inhabits the sadness of the traveller returning home to a cool welcome: the last twenty years have not tamed his technique, but do add poignancy to his childhood memory routines.


The vision of Glasgow does not account for the modern changes of the city: no hip bars in this West End, or bustling live music scenes, and the finale recreates a Scottishness that is beyond even kitsch. McConnell's choreography is straightforward, with none of the aggressive flourishes that see modern dancers shatter boundaries and scare the audience. Yet that is part of the pleasure: this is a solid, narrative dance, brave enough to tell an old story in an old manner.

John Wagner at Plan B

If one man has shaped the dystopian vision of British science fiction readers, it might be John Wagner. Responsible for the long running anti-hero Judge Dredd - soon to be appearing in a cinema near you, with a massive 3D chin - his visions of a future police state and the no-nonsense law-giver lent 2000AD the tough, macho tone that defined its identity as the most successful UK comic of the last thirty years.

Wagner, who has used a variety of pseudonyms which make the full extent of his work difficult to gauge, was brought up in Scotland, and a terse presbyterian morality infuses his writing. The world becomes the domain of the morally suspect, the corrupt and the violent. Like a series of Jacobean revenge tragedies, it is only the compromised who can right the wrongs, but forgiveness and redemption are distant.

His Button Man takes a tired trope - a secret murder game, funded by the bored rich - and stretches it into a violent conspiracy thriller, implicating American senators and revealing a world where trust is a virtue found only in dogs. Dredd is a difficult creation: a facist in all but name, he is the hero of his own stories and it took a series of explicit stories to remind readers that this future wasn't something to aspires towards. This deep ambiguity - it is Dredd's point of view that dominates, despite its obvious ugliness - introduced a complexity to 2000AD long before American comics recognised the power of the dark side.

By the time 2000AD had established itself, Wagner's dystopian views expanded to encompaass the Universe: one saga had Dredd visiting alien worlds, all trapped in various forms of oppression and savagery. Even the hoped for Messiah turns out evil, while Dredd's attempts to find him involve an any-means-necessary approach that kills colleagues and overturns entire civilisations.

Whether this analysis reflects on Wagner himself - his interviews are marked by a graceful generosity - his work upholds the most pessismistic strands in science fiction. Now the new Dredd movie is getting ready to wipe away the stain of Stallone's badly miscalculated version, it might be worth getting along to Plan B and buying up a few of the volumes that developed the legend.

Signing, Saturday 15 September @ Plan B