The Doors are Open, The Ceremony is about to Begin...

The regular reader of this blog (thank you, Ben) will no doubt be familiar with my fondness for top five lists. I also assume that he will be interested in those geographical locations that have shaped my love of Glasgow. Fortunately, Doors Open Day (Glasgow's Built Heritage Festival) is coming up soon (15-16 September). So I can do a series of Top Fives - places to catch over that weekend, and do a very special one that features the places that I have disgraced.

It's number one in the programme, and number one on this list: The Arches. This venue is very special to me, and not because it was built in the same year as I was born for the seventh time (1879). I've been going to see stuff here since I was a teacher: how well I remember that first National Review of Live Art, being utterly enchanted and confused and meeting the wonderful Lea out of Kylie Minoise.

It's basically a bunch of caverns underneath the railway, and has been, for the past twenty-one years, a multi-purpose arts venue. David Overend did some interesting performances about the heritage of the various spaces, and there's a history of clubbing, acting and drinking that is worth investigating. Plus, they have let me do something for their September festival, Arches Live! So you can buy a ticket to see me before they reveal the secret spaces below.

Argyle Street, underneath Central Station.

I would like to make Tramway my second choice - it influenced my taste in art beyond measure, but I can't find it listed in the brochure. I suppose it's always Doors Open Day there - what with The Hidden Garden outback, two galleries and a rather nice cafe. On Tuesdays, you can usually find me sitting upstairs desperately planning my Young Critics class (although I am willing to be distracted and, for the price of a coffee, make up a series of anecdotes about the building).

Hang on, I found it. And they have tours. It's on page fifteen.

Albert Drive, near MacDonalds.

 I am staying Southside for Govanhill Baths. Back in the day, before my political activism was scared out of me, I was involved in the campaign to keep these baths open. Now, the campaigners are slowly getting the space back to public use, and have plenty of cool artists doing stuff around the place (Adrian Howells is up to something with the NTS). However, the chance to check out the pools (now water-free, thanks Glasgow City Council) and the Edwardian architecture makes up for the ghost of my past idealism that currently sits outside in the porch and chides me everytime I stroll past.
I also had a really big row with someone in the big pool here. Ah, memories.

Calder Street, next to the Pandora pub.

Given my earlier inability to find Tramway, when I say that I am disappointed not to find St Aloysius Church in the programme, that means it is probably in there somewhere. I wanted to go on about how important the Jesuits are to me, how they shaped my philosophy and converted me from a Latin teacher into a critic. Instead, I'll have to make do with the Glasgow Film Theatre. That's where I went for lunch when I was teaching at St Al's School, and has a beautifully designed cafe. They are doing tours, too, although I reckon its better to go and see a film there. It just has a sense of occasion about it that I can't get in a multiplex.

Rose Street, abutting that crap big shoe shop

Langside Halls is just up the road from my house, and I saw a Big Gay Wedding there... it was the last part of Random Accomplice's Big Gay Trilogy and had free sweets. I also went to a few meetings there when I thought that I could change the world. I still think I can, but have decided that a vaguely cheeky blog about culture is more immediate than listening to other people explain how the world is wrong.

The Halls are having dramatic re-enactments throughout the weekend, although they don't say what they are enacting. Some historic moments... so probably not that time I had to run out of the yoga class because my pants were too tight, or the big public meeting about the dogshit all over the pavement.

Langside Avenue, at the bottom of the big park that is nice during the day

I haven't actually been to the Scottish Mask and Puppet Centre, but I am well into object manipulation these days. So my last choice is hopefully a future location for my ongoing affair with the Dear Green Place.

Balcarres Avenue, no idea where it is

She Plays

The Fringe has barely finished - well, I am still licking my wounds from it and hoping that I don't get ill after a month of sleeping on floors and eating on the run - and the Autumn seasons are starting up. There's even a few themes emerging, to give me a chance to create another idiosyncratic top five...

The strength of women is an oft-recorded part of recent Scottish history, at least as far as the theatre remembers it. The Steamie emphasised the importance of women's work in Glasgow in the 1950s, and two plays in Dundee celebrate the role of women in difficult times.

She-Town pretty much lays it all out in the title. An ambitious project from Dundee Rep, adding a cast of community performers alongside their core actors, it goes back to the depressed 1930s and highlights how women kept the city running. Starring Barbara Rafferty - best known for her TV work in Rab C Nesbit but has been a sparkling Scottish stage presence over the past decade - and a very large cast of women, Sharman MacDonald's new play is supported by a new Creative Scotland fund.

First in a Lifetime is designed to make work that opens up creativity to new people: this time, it has enabled community performers to appear in a professional production. Given that She-Town is all about  community, it's appropriate that this fund is supporting it.

12 - 29 September @ Dundee Rep


It's a bit cheeky to include Stellar Quines in my rundown of "theatre about women" - their remit has always been supportive to female artists. However, they have teamed up with Greyscale to run a tour by one of the world's oldest "new writers": Sylvia Dow is 73, and this is her first play.

A rehearsed reading last year revealed Dow's sensibility echoes the absurdism of Beckett, but with an added compassion and strong sense of contemporary anguish: while the early absurdist theatre entertained through a combination of lurking fear and the pointlessness of life, Dow pitches the horror of a relationship going nowhere, caught in the cycles of repressed hopes and polite reconciliations. It fits into both the Traverse's New Writing remit and the programming of Andy Arnold at the Tron (he loves a nice bit of absurdism), and Dow becomes an interesting take on the entire idea of "the young writer".

5- 8 September @ The Tron
18- 19 September at the Traverse

It's rare that I get out to the Brunton Theatre - although when I do, I get to go for a paddle in the sea and have an ice-cream from the lovely shop just across the road. The Brunton does have a programme that operates independently from the theatres in Edinburgh, featuring plenty of touring companies up from England.

Miriam Margoyles whetted my appetite for Dickens' Women at the Fringe, and the Brunton has followed up with Miss Havisham's Expectations. A one-woman show starring Linda Marlow (she once did Berkoff's Women, so will be familiar with the bloody end of female fictional characters), it takes up the story of Great Expectations and confronts the venerable Victorian author with the truth about the woman he trapped inside a moment.

Using biographical details from Dickens' life alongside the famous novel, Di Sherlock's script takes the writer to task for playing God with characters that he does not understand: and while adaptations can be a lazy way to make theatre, Miss Havisham's Great Expectations ignores the conventional period drama cliches and recontextualises one of fiction's great, lost tragic heroines.

Saturday 15 September @ Brunton Theatre

Next up, The Guid Sisters: I have talked about this already, but it is a bold start to the new season at the Lyceum. The NTS are involved, too, and it is one of the rare times that a piece starts at the Lyceum and doesn't force me to travel to Edinburgh to see it: it is coming to the King's, Glasgow, in October.

21 September - 13 October @ The Lyceum
23 - 27 October @ The King's, Glasgow 


Towards the end of next month, another project led by Cora Bissett (after Whatever Gets You Through the Night and Roadkill, she is becoming a force in Scottish production, even before looking at her acting) reveals a hidden history. The Glasgow Girls were seven young women who stood up for the rights of asylum seekers - a tough, political story that is perfect for a musical adaptation.

A script from David Greig and original songs from Bissett, MC Soom T and John Kielty (who has been perfecting the punk musical during the Fringe), the musical is no schmaltzy song-fest, but a celebration of the Glasgow that longs to find the true meaning of inclusion and multiculturalism. The NTS are involved again - the energy and imagination of the nation's big company is looking undiminished as it heads towards its eighth year - and both Bissett and Greig have reputations as hard-hitters.

31 October - 17 November @ The Citizens 

Physical Theatre

I tend to excuse my limited knowledging by presenting it as part of a critical process: unlike the more circumspect academic, who will access books and videos, I prefer to build my understanding of a particular art form through my experience of it. There are problems inherent in this process - I blush at the idiocy of my earlier attemts to define physical theatre, based on two shows I saw at the National Review of Live Art and a vague programme note by Steve Slater - but the bold statement, made to be revised and desperately carving a tiny space in the critical corpus, is at least entertaining and when wrong, controversial enough to encourage somebody to correct me.

In other words, I retain the right to be complacent, ignorant, melodramatic, wrong, partisan and partial. I place more emphasis on the comment that can stimulate debate than the definitive definition. And I apologise for any inconvenience caused.

So, having said all of that, let's get down to today's grand statements. Without a safety net, I am going to discuss physical theatre. Welcome.

Physical theatre is, in the largest definition, any theatre that is not a radio play. The other extreme is that it is a particular approach to theatre, inspired in the UK by the work of DV8 and Frantic Assembly, that combines choreography and script. A couple of Fringes back, I tried to call it "any theatre that begins not with the word, but the body and movement" and then spent an entire August breaking down work into categories, annoying performers and Aristotleans around the world.

Then I went for this. "If contemporary dance is what happened in the west when dancers flung off the constraints of ballet, physical theatre is the next step: performers throwing off the constraints of contemporary dance."

If that isn't too annoying, I am going to explore what I think physical theatre might be by comparing four productions: Knee Deep, Formby, The Static and SexLife. They were all in the 2012 Edinburgh Fringe.

Knee Deep and The Static are physical theatre. Formby and SexLife are not. My categorisations here are instinctive. Now I am going to work out why I think this.

Knee Deep is a series of acrobatic routines - very impressive and performed with intense concentration and a cool soundtrack - that conjures not a narrative but shifting moods. The company, Cacus, come from a circus background and Knee Deep attempts to strip away both the carnival trappings and the compulsion to link together the tricks through any narrative. They remove the glamour found in, say, La Clique's burlesque influenced acrobatics, and the sort of story told by Tumble Circus in This Is What We Do For A Living, which chronicles a relationship break-up.

The Static is a mixture of Davey Anderson's script and the direction of two Frantic Assembly alumni: deeply indebted to the Frantic Assembly house style, where scripted passages alternate with choreographed sequences, it has a story - boy meets girl, boy blows up school - and characterisation. That the characterisation is a little archetypal rather than nuanced is more to do with the script than the movement.

What these share is an interest in communication of ideas through movement alone. Admittedly, The Static has a bad habit of describing a scene before it is choreographed (the boy announces that if this were a film, the next bit would be a montage, before leaping into a movement montage to music). But the intention is clear. The choreography is central to the impact of both pieces.

Formby is a one man show, starring a former member of Matthew Bourne's cast for Swan Lake. And a central centre features some nifty tap dancing. But the thrust of the story - it's a recap of George Formby's life, as charming as the man himself - is relayed through the songs and the storytelling.
Davey Anderson uses a great deal of storytelling in The Static - the actors often drop character to comment on the plot - but Formby would rapidly collapse without the monologue. Dropping the dance sequence here would lose nothing but a rather impressive spot of syncopation. That would be a shame, but not devastating to the overall show. If the scene where the four actors in The Static dance the hero's training in mental superpowers, the stop would stop making sense.

In SexLife, the naked body marks a major shift in the plot. It doesn't move, just appears. That's pretty physical, except its meaning (that the couple are going to have sex again and probably get over the post-partum blues) is dependent on the speech that accompanies the disrobing. In fact, the speech is so important, the actor need not have got her kit off, which led to The Guardian moaning about gratuitous female nudity.

I suppose that my instinctive definition was based on the relative importance and attention to physical presence to the overall inpact of the drama. Knee Deep is the most physical piece - it intrigued me because it followed a similar structure to contemporary dance, only used a circus movement vocabulary - and SexLife the least: both Formby and SexLife could be radio plays, I guess. They'd lose something, but Knee Deep and The Static would end up sounding like those episodes of my Radio Hour when the guests don't turn up and I just keep playing records and bits of spoken word recordings.

There's a definition of physical theatre that won't make it into the academic texts. Strike one for the Vile Dictionary.

Good Women

It seems pretty clear that the traditional actor's complaint that "there are no good parts for women" has become untrue in Scotland. Recent months have seen The Guid Sisters - The NTS making good on the promise of their earlier all-female special, The House of Bernarda Alba - She-Town up in Dundee and Alison Peeble's searing My Shrinking Life. There was even a one woman special at The Oran Mor, The Great Disappointment of Santa Muerta, written and performed by the always imaginative Amanda Monfrooe.

Although The Guid Sisters was originally written in a French Canadian dialect, it has become something of a Scots classic: the translation went straight into Scots and, despite having some awkward edges - it's never clear why a bunch of Scottish ladies would have fancy French names or be so horrified by the thought of a club where people like to drink - picks up on the same cheeky energy of that genuinely home-spun classic, The Steamie. Praised for its representation of working class life, and respect for the strong female characters, The Guid Sisters acts as handy showcase for the wealth of wonderful Caledonia female actors.

My Shrinking Life is a deeply personal piece that sees Peebles grapple with the consequences of MS: unlike The Guid Sisters, it emphasises a stunning central performance (Peebles is brilliantly cynical, and even throws down a few of those Chekov and Shakespeare lines, just to prove she can). It's the same in Santa Muerta: the power of the actor defines the impact of the work. The Guid Sisters had a few star turns - that one out of Chewing The Fat - but was mostly all about the ensemble. In fact, it would be unfair to pick out one or two names as exceptional when the play is predicated on each character being revealed through their interactions with the others.

At this point, I probably ought to make some ridiculous statement about how things have gone too far the other way, and that men aren't getting their share. As it goes, there are still more male authors and directors knocking about, and equality is probably still a distance away. Instead, I'll make another sly dig at those directors who pick Shakespeare - if there was less Shakespeare on stage, they'd be more good roles for women - and vaguely wonder whether the very idea of talking about "male" and "female" theatre is even relevant.

Santa Muerta and My Shrinking Life are both very personal works, but the issues they raise are not insular. They share a preoccupation with death - one's concerned with the denial of it, the other with its inevitability - and range across various emotions that are not necessarily limited to the artist's life.

Arches Theatre Festival 2008

EVENT REVIEW BY GARETH K VILE.
PUBLISHED IN THE SKINNY 24 APRIL 2008

It is always best to take the Arches Theatre Festival as a bundle: visiting the odd piece runs the risk of missing something crucial, or ending up seeing all bad shows. The range of genres, and the admirably scatter-shot selection, is inclusive - although it demands a serious fortnight of underground attendance.

The two plays that won this year’s Arches Award for Directors are a gentle start. Both are script orientated, capable of transfer to Edinburgh and best respected as works in progress. Both feel like sketches: Bring Me The Head of Comrade Bukhari is in thrall to Clockwork Orange, with its juvenile delinquents and absurdist dialogue, while Sixteen falls between realism and allegory. Neither piece fully convinces, lacking powerful words or startling stage-craft: they are solid, respectable experiments from young talents.

Sixteen’s script is especially disappointing, despite three strong performances. Playing for laughs with Alzheimer’s, impotence and a comedy foreigner, it nevers grapples with the implications of its - frankly unlikely- sexual scenario. In the final third, the dissipated themes combine to create a few moments of hyper-real intensity, as mother, daughter, husband and lover exchange roles in a bizarre battle.

Bring Me The Head of Comrade Bukhari is performed equally well, with a script that delights in sharp exchanges and a cast who bounce between menace and wit. It doesn't really have much to say - the lack of detail about the characters is annoyingly vague rather than ambiguous, and prevents any real sympathy, while the moral dilemma at the heart of the play is barely considered. Bukhari suggests a possible connection between absurdism and a more socially engaged theatre. It is better praised for intentions rather than delivery.

If these two can be judged by conventional standards, both An Oak Tree and Dias De Las Noches cast off into difficult waters. An Oak Tree is Tim Crouch’s serious attempt to integrate live direction into the performance - he is joined on stage every night by a performer who has never seen the script. Dias De Las Noches is pure physical theatre - the acting equivalent of free jazz where an apparently random series of threats, tricks, dancing, nudity, skeletons, clowns and gun-shots combine to create an event that is mystifying and - depending on taste - unforgettable.

An Oak Tree explores the aftermath of a child’s death in a road accident. Crouch is both director on-stage and the awkward hypnotist-cum-child killer, who is confronted by the child’s father, who is also the victim of his hypnotic act. Once the hypnotist’s performance has collapsed, Crouch homes in on the devastation caused by the death, undercut by sudden shifts into directorial sessions. Surprisingly, this does not destroy the tension or pathos, but allows Crouch’s charming personality to redeem his grinning hypnotist. Initially he seems to be a slick showman, all naff asides and false bonhomie. He is gradually revealed as devastated, confused: the father looks to him for help, not revenge.

Teatr Novogo Fronto are in their own league: there is a vague story behind the mayhem concerning a comedy double act and a South American revolution, but this is less interesting than the sheer levels of absurd confusion they rapidly cause. Four actors take on multiple identities and chase each other around the stage in pursuit of love or death. A sense of menace pervades even the lightest moments and the frenetic pace is sustained to the explosive finale. Regret, frustration, and insecurity are all played out, evoked in the audience and flung to one side: through sheer pace and volume Dias De Las Noches attempts to by-pass rational thought. It fails to make any coherent statements: it is, however, glorious hysteria.