There's no point crying over spilt milk

(images taken from Aby Watson's previous performances.)

Scottish Ensemble Mozart & Moz-art

Donald Does Dusty

Margaret Kirk looks forward to a work from the King of the Drag Kings
EVENT PREVIEW BY GARETH K VILE.
PUBLISHED IN THE SKINNY 02 MARCH 2009


Diane Torr creates work that is humorous, intimate, accessible and serious. Emerging from her formidable intellect and compassion, Donald Does Dusty has a personal origin, but encompasses broader matters.

DDD is a tribute to her brother. “He died of Aids in 1992, and was an extraordinary person, going from this housing estate near Aberdeen to be a wealthy property dealer in London,” says Torr. “He died at 43, and seemed so unfair that he never lived to enjoy the fruits of his labour.”

The show homes in on Donald’s youthful fascination with Dusty Springfield. “My brother somehow knew that Dusty was a lesbian. She was like a light for him,” she recalls. Perhaps importantly: “He performed Dusty – I’d be the one who watched him.” This was Torr’s first contact with drag. “He would dress up in my mother’s clothes – her evening dress and fur stole, long diamante earrings. Then I’d get bored, and he’d throw a tantrum.”

Since Torr is most famous as a drag king, with both workshops and performances, this early encounter appears crucial. As Donald was an actor, his influence on Diane’s path seems key. “He would make jokes that he would dress up as me and I’d dress up as him, and we’d perform together – but it never happened because he died.”

Donald Does Dusty is a personal work, but grapples with themes of gender identity, family relationships, inspiration and mourning. Torr’s consummate stagecraft, sensitivity and desire to communicate with the audience promises a moving and thought-provoking evening.

Hey Harry Help!

Hey Harry,

I did want to start this conversation slowly: a few general questions about anarchism as a ideology within theatre, the role of performance within activism. You know, abstract stuff that opens up a chat, finds common ground, gives us a framework. Terms of reference, shared assumptions, that kind of thing.

Only, as always, events have caught up with me. I am not the biggest fan of the Conservative party, but I nearly soiled myself when I read David Cameron's thoughts on human rights today. Let's recap his words...

Of course, it’s not just the European Union that needs sorting out – it’s the European Court of Human Rights.
When that charter was written, in the aftermath of the Second World War, it set out the basic rights we should respect.
But since then, interpretations of that charter have led to a whole lot of things that are frankly wrong.
Rulings to stop us deporting suspected terrorists.
The suggestion that you've got to apply the human rights convention even on the battle-fields of Helmand.
And now – they want to give prisoners the vote.
I’m sorry, I just don't agree.

Let's pause there for a moment. Apart from the rather odd tricolon here - he starts with the most frightening thing (terrorists!), and ends on a bathetic note (prisoners getting the vote), I can't quite get my head around Cameron's process here. He seems to be saying the charter of the European Court of Human Rights 'we should respect.' then goes on to say the interpretation are 'frankly wrong.'

I'm sorry, Dave, I just don't agree. If we accept the basic foundation, don't we have to accept its working out through its application? 

I am actually pretty frightened by the thought that Britain might drop our human rights. It's not just the company we'd be keeping (Belarus, Greece during its junta period): it's the idea that a 'British bill of rights' would somehow replace the universal quality of 'human rights.'

So - I am wondering where you'd stand on human rights? I think that they are a fiction, something we made up, but that they represent an ideal - a Platonic Form of social justice that defines us as individual beings of worth - that governments can work towards. They can never be reached, but each attempt makes the world a little better. And a British bill of rights suggests that rights are not universal, but belong to a nation and its citizens. 

And so, other nations, other citizens, can't share those rights. 

I rather hope I am over-reacting. How do you understand this?

A Bit of Random Thought

In the introduction to Scottish Theatre, Randall Steven claims that the recent (that is, the 1970s) growth in Scottish performance is related to the use of Scots in scripts. Admittedly, it's a little out of date (printed 1996). Having watched Sunset Song, the adaptation of Lewis Grassic Gibbon's novel, I am not sure that this correspondence can be read as causal. The language of LGG is Scots, with some lovely poetic twists, but the language itself is not enough to carry a plot that takes in WWI, female oppression, the move away from an agrarian economy and the connection between humans and their land.

The adaptation takes as much of LGG's text as it can handle without collapsing into a book reading. Plenty of key moments, including the birth of a baby and the death of the heroine's husband, are told as they are shown: despite a few moments of choreography, Selladoor's production gives reign to the script's verbosity. This is  nothing to do with Scots as a viable theatrical language, nor a critique of Julie Ellen's  direction: rather, it is a problem with a theatre that is literary in nature, and has too much respect for language.

Randall Steven's claim is not necessarily supported by the subsequence growth of Scottish theatre: not only are many of Scotland's new wave of creators less interested in the script as the singular foundation of a performance (since 1996, Cryptic, Untitled and Vanishing Point have become major players, all of whom are intrigued by theatre's visual aspects), they have not noticeably taken up works in Scots. And even those writers who often visit Scottish themes do not recognise Scots as the lingua franca of Scotland. In the contemporary multicultural Scotland, it isn't.

That said, Sunset Song uses Scots because it is about a people who spoke Scots - and, despite some rather obvious metaphors about the woman as the land, there are moments of poetry and passion that Scots is perfectly balanced to express. What might be the case is that theatre, with its opportunity to craft a language's identity, offers a place for Scots to grow....