Edinburgh 2012: Appointment with the Wicker Man

The basic premise is golden, unbeatable. A Scottish am-dram society, the Loch Parry Players, are staging a version of the Wicker Man and have been obliged to draft in a professional actor from the mainland to replace their leading man, Roger Morgan, who has gone missing in mysterious circumstances. As meta-theatrical frameworks go, you couldn’t ask for a richer one. It quivers with potential. There are so many ways they could take it. But the creative team behind this update of Robin Hardy’s 1973 folk horror classic never really fulfil that promise.

Clearly intended as a loving homage from a pair of writers, Greg Hemphill and Donald McLeary, who are both self-confessed Wicker Man obsessives, it falls down because the framing narrative, the production-within-the-production, is so broad in tone. There’s an initially amusing juxtaposition between the worlds of amateur and professional theatre, but the Loch Parry players themselves are cut from the roughest cloth: there’s a randy wardrobe mistress, Morag, her camp-as-Christmas, purple Lycra-clad husband, Callum, and the permanently drugged-up technician, Fran. Only Rory, the Glaswegian television actor and stand-in for Officer Howie – played by Sean Biggerstaff (a name ripe for Restoration comedy if there ever was one) – doesn’t eat the scenery and chase it down with a pint of Irn Bru. While the contrast is clearly intentional and works within the framework of the production it doesn’t stop it grating, just as inserting a big Broadway-style number in at the beginning and then commenting on its crassness and inappropriateness doesn’t entirely excuse it.

Some of the references are admittedly delicious. There is a whole section devoted to the moment where Lord Summerisle sends a boy up to Willow’s bedroom to be ‘sacrificed to Aphrodite’ complete with the snail-mating sequence, which was cut from the original theatrical release. May Morrison’s sweet shop, with its phallic candies and pagan jelly tots, is also referenced though much to Rory’s frustration the Loch Parry version is only stocked with out-of-date Curly Wurlies

There are some lovely throw-away lines too: one character gushes about being a huge fan of Nicholas Cage when asked if she’s ever actually seen the film, somebody else mentions The Equalizer. They save the famous seduction sequence to the end. In the film this was a writhing, primal explosion of a scene performed to Paul Giovanni’s sensuous Willow’s Song (most of the film’s original music is recreated here, another small pleasure of the production), with Britt Ekland slapping the adjoining tavern wall with her palms while the virginal Edward Woodward sweated, cowered and all but combusted in his bed. Ekland memorably required a body-double for certain shots; here the scene is replicated with Sally Reid’s Marie wearing a comedy nude suit complete with bean-bag tits and a Mick Hucknall wig affixed to her pubic triangle. So much of the humour comes down to bums and boobs, which is fine in and of itself, but it also means that the epic pile up of revelations about the various characters’ emotional lives that fills the last ten minutes has zero value.

What really riles is the fact that there are a couple of genuinely unnerving moments scattered throughout Vicky Featherstone’s production, a couple of skin-tingling instances where the performers creep around the stage in animal masks and an air of the sinister pervades. But these moments are constantly undercut by its insistence on silliness when conversely the production is at its strongest when it plays things comparatively straight, when it allows its characters to be characters rather than ‘types.’

While you have to admire a production that inserts one of Woodward’s anguished cries to his Christ into its big musical finale, the image that lingers is not of a burning effigy – though all credit to designer Chloe Lamford for creating an impressive Wicker Man/Iron Giant hybrid for the last scenes – but of this glorious gift an idea being so poorly realised, of all that potential going up in smoke.

Reviewed for Exeunt

Peter Pan at the Barbican

"I think that to die would be an awfully big adventure."

There has always been an inherent darkness in Peter Pan, with its land full of lost and abandoned boys longing for a mother to love them, its crocodiles with ticking guts and a taste for human flesh, but rarely has there been a version as murky as John Tiffany’s production for the National Theatre of Scotland.

In David Greig’s adaptation the haunting and iconic story of the boy who never grows up has been transplanted to J.M. Barrie’s native Scotland and Mr Darling is working as an engineer, overseeing the construction of the Forth Bridge. He’s a stern, distracted but not unkind father who dispatches his children’s beloved dog Nana to the backyard.

When Peter Pan flies into the Darling nursery one night through an open window, he tempts and taunts the three Darling children, Wendy, Michael and John, with tales of pirates, fairies and a land where no one will tell them what to do. Seduced, they follow him home to Neverland – but Greig’s Neverland is a harsh and hostile land where the Lost Boys must fend for themselves, often going hungry if Peter fails to bring them home food.

The boys flock to Wendy like bees to lavender, demanding that she tell them stories and generally look after them. Their biggest adversary, apart from hunger, is Captain Hook – here kilt-wearing, tattooed and fearsome in appearance – the one-handed pirate chief.

Tiffany’s staging is often visually very striking. Tinkerbell is depicted as a tiny flickering ball of flame, not entirely dissimilar to the fiery, molten rivets that are thrown about by the young lads working on the Forth Bridge. The flying apparatus is also always visible and the characters bounce and clamber across the set in a manner reminiscent of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (albeit with the wires and harnesses on display); Peter even, at one point, takes a stroll down one side of the Barbican's proscenium arch. But the production is hampered by an uncertainty of tone and a certain acoustic muddiness, whole lines of dialogue get swallowed up or are only half-audible.

There’s a lack of tension in many of the scenes and an excess of rawness in others. Peter’s fury on finding that Wendy has grown older is unsettling and frightening (and made the young girl sitting next to me start to cry) but other potentially potent moments, such as when Peter brings a poisoned Tinkerbell back to life or the final approach of Hook's crocodile nemesis (represented by a sole reptilian eye), feel rather rushed and lacking in magic.

Davey Anderson’s Scottish music - a collage of folk tunes and working men’s songs - is evocative and Laura Hopkins' set is clever and versatile, with segments of the Forth Bridge revolving to reveal the vines and forests of Neverland.

Kirsty Mackay, as Wendy, strikes a good balance between a girl thirsty for adventure and a woman forced to play mother to a whole tribe, while Kevin Guthrie captures something of both the romance and isolation of Peter, the eternal boy, untouched by time, unburdened by memory, utterly free but also forever alone

Reviewed for musicomh

Architecting at the Barbican

Architecting, an ambitious exploration of emotional and social repair, is stimulating and exciting and messy and frustrating in equal measure.

Devised by the TEAM (Theatre of the Emerging American Moment) in association with the National Theatre of Scotland the piece began life as a BAC Scratch commission in 2006 before a much expanded version drew plaudits last year at Edinburgh's Traverse Theatre in 2008 and at New York’s Performance Space 122 earlier this year.


As the audience enters the theatre a woman is already on stage crooning in country-and-western fashion as her companion strums a guitar on his guitar. A bottle of JD sits on a nearby table and, behind her, the walls are papered in Tyvek wrap; a couple of CCTV monitors flicker from the corners of the versatile wooden box that forms the centre of Nick Vaughan’s set (and, by turns, represents a New Orleans bar, a service station, and a pony cart).

Perhaps as a result of its multi-stranded structure, it takes a little while for the production to warm up. In the first few minutes numerous themes and ideas are introduced, from a thermodynamic view of history to the architectural merit of Chartres Cathedral; only after a while do the various threads (to an extent) separate themselves.

Architect Carrie Campbell arrives in a post-Katrina New Orleans to oversee the completion of a new property project – a TND (Traditional New Development) called Phoenix Meadows – that had been designed and originated by her late father. The locals, those that remain, are not altogether happy with this re-imagining of a traditional American community, this re-packaging of their city into neat, polished boxes.

This present day scenario – the battered yet proud American south – is paralleled with another period of reconstruction, the one that occurred after the American Civil War, and this is viewed through the particular prism of Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind. Mitchell herself is a presence on stage (played by Lana Lesley as an intelligent woman slightly unsettled by the freight train success of her novel) as is her iconic heroine Scarlett O’Hara.

Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind is further tied to the present day narrative by a storyline involving a boorish Hollywood producer who is trying to get a new production of the book off the ground; this time with a black director and with various trims, tweaks and wholesale re-writes having been made to bring it more into keeping with modern sensibilities, especially in regard to race. The producer suggests turning one of the O’Hara servants into Martin Luther King’s grandfather and making him an early campaigner for civil rights, but the director, having started to read the novel for the first time (his parents wouldn’t allow it in the house) becomes fascinated with the book and its depiction of the American South.

Rachel Chavkin’s multimedia production is hugely ambitious in scope and execution: characters both real and imagined happily interact, while music and video, dance and movement, all form a part of the collage. The performers all play numerous roles and gender and race provide no barrier to their character-hopping; at various points throughout the production every person on stage dons a hoop skirt and corset to play Scarlett O’Hara and the most famous exchange of dialogue between Scarlett and Rhett is delivered by the two male cast members.

There are numerous moments of humour that stop it from being too overwhelming, but at near on three hours, though it rarely lags, it does sometimes feel like the work of an artist who can’t help but keep adding and refining until some original clarity is lost. This is a complex but intriguing piece, a thing of many bricks, and it’s not always as coherent as it could be but in the last few minutes, as Carrie (compellingly played by Libby King, the emotional core of the show) delivers her final plea, everything else falls away and the audience are left listening to the cathedral-echo of her voice alone.

Reviewed for musicOMH.

Black Watch at the Barbican (Take Two)

I was tempted to let that last line stand, after all what can one hope to add to the waves of acclaim that have followed this production since its Edinburgh debut in 2006? A production that is near enough finished its London run anyway? Not that much. But I feel the need to say something and, obviously, it was not merely OK, it was rather brilliant – and it passed the Mother Test with flying colours. Despite her pained expression when informed she was going to the Barbican, and despite the fact that the Barb lived up to expectations by being roped off in places necessitating much wondering up and down stairs to find a bar that had any wine to serve us, my mum said it was the best thing I’ve ever taken her to see – a fact only partly influenced by the fact she found herself standing by the fountains next to Ralph Fiennes when she went out on the terrace to smoke her pre-show cigarette.

I also loved it; it certainly deserves all the praise it has attracted. John Tiffany’s National Theatre Of Scotland production creates a rare harmony between the visual and the emotional. While the material mined from the interviews with the Black Watch soldiers is already full of powerful stories – like that of the soldier, who having survived an attack that left his friends dead, keeps rebreaking his injured arm every time it begins to heal – the power of these stories are enhanced by the scenes of dance and mime, which successfully convey the things left unsaid in this intense, insular military world: the longing for those left at home, the men’s sense of fear and frustration.

The ensemble cast have a fantastic rapport with one another, conveying the mutual protectiveness and the intense sense of connection that comes from co-existing together in a place where you may need to kill or could be killed at any time, and while I partially agree with the Whingers, in that it wasn’t quite the sum of parts, it contained so many separate wonderful moments – the pool table, the final tainted Tattoo – that it didn’t really matter. Anyway, I could go on – at some length – but I suspect it’s all been said already.

All Greek

I headed over to Hammersmith on Thursday for the National Theatre of Scotland's production of The Bacchae at the Lyric. Having sorted out my tickets a while ago I was delighted to discover that Andrew from the West End Whingers, Helen Smith and City Slicker would also be in attendance on the same evening and we duly met up for a pre-show drink on the theatre’s terrace (anyone know the collective noun for a group of bloggers?)

And the show? Well, it's already played in Edinburgh and Glasgow, so it's been around for a bit. This is David Greig's version of Euripides' tragedy with John Tiffany, the man behind Blackwatch, directing, and Alan Cumming as Dionysus – a concept that seems inordinately exciting to some. I don't think it fully delivered on its promise. It felt more like a collection of incredibly striking moments than a really satisfying theatrical experience, and was peppered with considerable longueurs. It begins with Alan Cumming descending headfirst on a harness (wearing, not a dress, as some have said, but a gold kilt and waistcoat combo). The chorus of Bacchae were clad in the most wonderful feathery red dresses and boasted an amazing range of singing voices between them. There was also an unexpectedly convincing severed head. Oh, and there was fire – a burst of hot, fire-y fire – the force of which could be felt back in row J of the stalls. These things, on their own, all worked wonderfully.

And of course there was Cumming. I can never quite make up my mind about Alan Cumming; as Andrew commented, he's quite a show-off as an actor, and I found his tic-driven performance in Bent last year quite alienating. But while the same can be said of his performance here, his stage presence, his force of personality and way with an audience are such that, when he was off stage the show rather stumbled, a fact that undermined the impact of the scenes with Paola Dionisotti, excellent as Agave, the mother of the slain Pentheus. Though, at first, the shift in tone was welcome, this rather wail-heavy interlude eventually grew a little wearing and I found myself hoping for a return to the over-the-top campery of earlier in the evening.

Perhaps inevitably there were further post-show drinks (as discussed previously, the chief benefit of staging something without an interval is that it leaves room for at least two bottles of wine afterwards, not a glass as I erroneously stated) and we even managed to snag one of the Bacchae (the lovely Marcia Mantack) and bombard her with questions about the production. She patiently explained how some of the effects were achieved (the cool moment where flowers fall from the sky is done with darts not magnets as we had thought) and revealed just why it’s never advisable to let on to your choreographer that you are still capable of doing a cartwheel.