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Seven Ages
- Tour.
This play was first performed at the Highland Festival in 2001.
Playwright - Hamish MacDonald.
Co-Directors - Matthew Zajac.
Designer - David Ramsay.
Musical Director - Jonny Hardie.
Company - Dogstar Theatre Company. Email.
Cast - here .
2003 Tour Dates and Times - here .
Seen to review at G12, Gilmore Hill, Glasgow on 27 February 2004.
Run Time - 2 hours 35 minutes including 15 mins interval.
Reviewer - Thelma Good.
Variable but some bold confident scenes.
Using the idea of Shakespeare's seven ages of man, " All the world's
a stage..." Hamish MacDonald sets each age of man through the themes
of birth, education, love, war, wisdom, old age to second childhood and
the end. Each age is set in a different time using ancient tales, lives
in other centuries, going right up to the modern day and into the future.
There's a shaky, overly formal first scene set in the mists of time where
a child causes, merely by the way it looks out of its eyes, the midwife's
death. But the play takes better grip in the next one, the education of
Sir Thomas Urquhart, and is played with more verve and life. Then we encounter
two characters who return as older selves later, Ranald and Marianna,
he a Scottish man, she a Jew escaping the horrors of the Nazis. Though
they fall in love, Ranald in typical Scottish manner fails to say what
he should and Marianna at the war's end returns to Europe to search for
her father.
War and its effects also underlie the next part where Kenny in the TA
gets called up to go to the 2003 Iraqi war. The conclusion eight years
on reminds that weapons of immediate destruction can have lingering terminal
effects. To illustrate wisdom, in a treat of dramatized storytelling,
Alyth McCormack is the injured Dan the Leg while Matthew Zajac
delights in the role of the dense, muscle bound villain Scobie.
Then we go back to Ranald, old and wandering in his mind and the woman
he lost and maybe found, it's hard to be sure and the uncertainty slightly
undermines this look at old age. It's all topped off with a very fine
dramatisation of a folktale about the boy played by MacDonald and
his aging mother and Death both played by Zajac. This, where death's
hand is stayed by trapping him, evokes modern resonances of our own attempts
to stop ageing and the final curtain. It's played in a bold confident
style also encountered in the Urquhart and Dan the Leg stories.
It's a variable play where some scenes work very well and are moving or
comic or both. But the coupling of action with spoken narrative saying
"he then..." too often has the effect of reducing the life and
immediacy. The music and well performed songs add colour to many of the
pieces, with the musicians lit behind a framed gauze. But the decision
to have many costumes changes, where the lights were dimmed as the actors
went to a rail set off the circular raised stage at one side, is clumsy
and interrupts too much the flow of the production.
© Thelma Good 27 February 2004. - Published on EdinburghGuide.com
Review by EdinburghGuide of Dogstar theatre's 2003 tour of The
Strathspey King starring Billy Riddoch and also by Hamish MacDonald..
Cast: Matthew Zajac and Alyth McCormack. Music
performed live by Jonny Hardie on Fiddle and Guitar and Mary McMaster
on Clasach, Electro Harp and she also sings.
2004 Tour Details of Dogstar Theatre's production
of Seven Ages.
Tour begins
19 Feb at 8pm Skerray Village Hall 01641521212
20 Feb at 7:30pm Kinlochbervie Village Hall 01971 511381
21 Feb at 8pm Ullapool Village Hall 01854 612103
24 Feb at 7:30pm Skye Sabhal Mor Ostaig 01471 844 207
25 Feb at 8pm Strontian Arainn Shuaineirt (The Sunart Centre) 01397 709228
26 Feb at 7:30pm Bute Mount Stuart 01700 503 877
27 Feb at 7:30pm Glasgow GilmorehillG12 0141 330 5522
28 Feb at 7:30pm Clashmore Carnegie Hall 01862 811 068 (Sawyar's Newsagent,
Dornoch)
2 March at 8pm Plockton Hall 01599 534702
3 March at 7:30pm Skye Aros 01478 613750
5 March at 8pm Mull Aros Hall Tobermory 01688 302828
6 March at 8pm Strathdon Lonach Hall 01463 783 056
9 March at 7:30pm Lochinver Village Hall 01571844262.
10 March at 8pm Inverness Eden Court Theatre 01463 234 234
11 March at 8pm Birnam Institute 01350 727674
12 & 13 March at 8pm Edinburgh Traverse 0131 228 1404
Tour ends
Theatre Editor, Thelma Good's e-mail is
thelma@edinburghguide.com
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.
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