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Your Turn To Clean The Stair - tour
Playwright - Rona Munro
Director - Michael Emans
Designer - Lyn McAndrews
Company - Rapture Theatre Company - Cast see end of review
Venues & Dates - see end of review
Seen to review at Cottier Theatre Glasgow
Reviewer - Thelma Good
This comedy turning into a dark nastiness
Ten years on from its original production at the Traverse Rona Munro's
play has its first professional revival. This production deals fairly
well with its hard to sustain, complex structure, where some action happens
in a possible dream state. Lyn McAndrews has designed a set which enables
the play to move from realism to dream sequence and contains four flats,
landings and halls within the one space, her chosen colour scheme of reds
and greens also works well.
It starts as a comedy, with Mrs Mackie the elderly resident self nominated
in charge of the stair*, every tenement in Scotland
practically used to have one of these women. They moved in as young brides,
caring for their men through decades, seeing them off to their final resting
places and lived on seeing the society change around them. This comedy
turning into a dark nastiness reverberates like a slamming main door for
anyone who's lived on a stair.
Mrs Mackie's stair has a single Mum Kay, Harriet Hunter, toughened
by life's direct attacks and Hunter has her to the skimpy T-shirt. A young
couple Brian, Duncan R.Edwards, always sanding down something and
Lisa, Rosalind Sydney, a working wife who is always on the verge
of snapping at someone, and sleepwalks when upset. And across the hall
is Bobby a single man who's a walking Innovation catalogue but his finances
are dodgy, James Sutherland plays him with a strong macho flavour,
an almost charming Scotsman on the make. Cleaning furiously, trying to
make Bobby do the stair when it's his turn, is Mrs Mackie, an accurate,
ultimately very disturbing portrait of a woman who lives alone well portrayed
by Deirdre Murray.
Murray, Hunter and Sutherland give the multilayered characterisations
the play requires. The most challenging role is the uptight Lisa, Sydney
plays her too exasperatingly in the opening scenes, but in the second
act, her approach becomes more multi-faceted, as her sleepwalking delusions
increase and Mrs Mackie talks of "things that need to be dealt with."
Munro's examination of lies, how issues and actions avoided come home
to wreak havoc rather than roost, shows this challengingly structured
play is worth this revival. On their present minimal resources Rapture
Theatre show yet again they have abilities worthy of better funding in
future.
© Thelma Good 17 September 2002. - Published on EdinburghGuide.com
Cast:
Lisa Rosalind Sydney
Mrs Mackie - Deirdre Murray
Kay - Harriet Hunter
Brian - Duncan R. Edwards
Bobby - James Sutherland
Rapture
Theatre's production of Your Turn To Clean The Stair
Tour begins
13 Sept at 7:30pm Musselburgh Brunton Theatre 0131 665 2240
14 - 21 Sept 2002 not Suns at 8pm Glasgow Cottier Theatre, Hyndland
Street 01355 236651
22 Sept at 8pm East Kilbride Arts Centre 013552 61000
25 September at 7:30pm Falkirk Town Hall 01324 506850
27 September at 7:30pm Paisley Arts Centre 0141 887 1010
3 October at 7:30pm North Edinburgh Arts Centre Pennywell Court
0131 315 2151
11 October at 7:45pm Harbour Arts Centre, Irvine 01294274059
19 October at 7:45pm. Cumbernauld Theatre 01236 732887
Tour ends
*About the Stair - In Scotland, in the centre
of towns, people have for centuries lived in tall buildings where individual
flats or apartments have their own front doors which all open on to the
common internal stair on several flights, the whole building, the tenement,
has a main door and shared back green. There can be 2 - 6 flats on each
flight. The common stair is a common responsibility, the lighting of it
is often the council's, but the cleaning of it is done by the tenement
dwellers who do it in turn. You know when you have to do it when a notice
saying "It's Your Turn To Clean The Common Stair" is hung on
your front door handle. Increasingly nowadays a company or individual
is employed by everyone in the stair to clean the stair regularly instead
of the flat owners/renters in turn.
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