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| Edinburgh : A&E : Theatre: Reviews |
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Theatre listings > Bright Colours Only We're ushered into a carpeted room with a settee, an arm-chair, a TV and a spread of sandwiches, tea, coffee and whisky. Oh yes, and a coffin. It is a wake, our hostess/performer, Pauline Goldsmith, is eager that we have all have enough before she begins. Her first character is a Glaswegian undertaker who one suspects has missed her vocation as a beautician. She gathers us round the coffin, explaining its decorative handles, the satin lining and the one end padded with cardboard to prevent head banging, as for the corpse, always moisturise. We settle down to enjoy a Belfast girl's reflections on death. With the TV on (her family's was only turned off for three hours when her father died) she watches with us a Sesame Street song. The hovering theme of death is brought to life through some very funny characterisations - her aunt, her mother and most captivatingly, her grandmother. Embittered, opinionated, self-pitying, on her death-bed for a year, her old woman is wonderfully detailed and painfully accurate. Mostly the characters in the piece die. Alarmingly, she herself fetches up in the coffin as it leans against the wall, crying over the things she never did, that she's not ready to go. But go she does. Stepping out of the coffin, the lid is replaced, and she walks with us, all vestiges of her character left behind in the box. Four undertakers solemnly lead us through the building and out of the Arches' rear exit, where a funeral car awaits. We stand and watch the coffin slid into the car in silence then driven off slowly. The man sitting in his parked car the evening I was there, looked genuinely moved by the proceedings, then slightly shocked and confused by our applause. Pauline Goldsmith's monologue is genuine, profound and funny -
a testament to the quality of theatre achieved by a talented and brilliantly
observant actor with the courage to write her own material. Bright Colours
Only is a timely reminder to the conventional theatre-world of the power
and relevance of the actor as a creative artist. Theatre listings >>
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