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| Edinburgh : A&E : Theatre: Reviews |
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Theatre listings >
Playwright - Wallace Shawn. Director - Alasdair McCrone. Designer - Alica Hendrick. Lighting Designer - Struan Sewell. Composer/Sound Engineer - Martin Low Cast - here. Company - Mull Theatre Company. www.mulltheatre.com Venue - Mull Little Theatre at Dervaig, Mull. Dates - 31 July to 6 September at 8:30pm in rep with Designated Mourner after 31 July. Running Time - 2 hrs 15 mins including 15 minute interval. Reviewer - Thelma Good. Striking production makes you sit up & think. This is the kind of production with monitors, steel, glass and black curved desks against a screen background that you expect to encounter in highbrow urban venues. What is striking is that this is being staged in Mull, fairly remote from city artifice even though it is not a cultural desert and has its own very successful theatre. And it's being staged in the holiday season when some theatre managements would go low brow. Mull Theatre's Artistic Director Alasdair McCrone knows his audience, they pile back in to Mull Theatre's intimate space eagerly after the interval for more of this demanding play. Jack is, in his uncle's words, "a rat from a family of rats" - he does what he can to survive- at the play's end he has survived to be the only mourner. An english graduate in an unspecified country whose intellectual class becomes distant from both the ruling class and the "dirt-eaters", he finds himself in a group lead by Howard, a poet who outside his coterie no-one reads. Alasdair McCrone is unctuous as Jack, like most rats he has the powerful disquieting charm of the untrustworthy. As the play continues you wonder just how much he is only an observer and who are the enemies of whom.
As McCrone admits in the programme, it's a difficult play. Go with your mind ready to listen and piece together the jigsaw, though the production's soundtrack by Martin Low may make it unnecessarily difficult. Not set in any specific country, it's redolent of the fate of intellectuals in regimes which tolerate but contain them, and their overthrowers who take a sterner, more confining and removing approach. By using their own Scottish accents, Shawn's text, containing a South American flavour, is given an added global dimension. It's a striking production to find in any Scottish theatre, written by a radical and challenging US playwright. Clearly Director Alasdair McCrone believes be you a "dirt-gatherer", sand and scenery seeker, sophisticate or even an intellectual hanger-on like Jack, you will get something special from the challenge. It causes you to re-examine your disengagement from politics and real life. And to make one heartened about the audiences for dramatic challenges up and down our land in remote areas as well as in the so-called intellectual cities. This sharp production, scaled up for larger venues, should be touring Scotland in Spring 2004. ©Thelma Good 28 August 2003 - Published on EdinburghGuide.com Cast: - Alasdair MCrone - Jack, Beth Marshall - Judy and John Langford - Howard. Review of Wallace Shawn play Fever produced by Citizen's in 2002. More information on Mull Theatre Company and reviews of their productions - Here. Although every effort has been taken to ensure the accuracy of the information presented in these pages, no responsibility can be accepted for any errors or omissions. Theatre Editor, Thelma Good's e-mail is thelma@edinburghguide.com Theatre listings >
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