Feature: Hair designer Scott Cooper speaks on the needs of performers of colour

Hair today, and tomorrow, for new theatre awards’ sponsor

Hair designer Scott Cooper speaks out on the need for better provision of hair and make-up design for performers of colour

BY SUNDAY NATIONAL THEATRE CRITIC MARK BROWN

_{Scott Cooper}

On Sunday June 16 the prize-giving ceremony of the Critics’ Awards for Theatre in Scotland (CATS) will be held at Glasgow’s splendid Theatre Royal. Eagle-eyed guests at the annual celebration might notice that the awards have a new sponsor this year.

   Alongside regular sponsors (ranging from actors’ union Equity to corporate sponsor STV), Glasgow business BB Hair Collective will be giving the awards its backing. The Hope Street company will, appropriately enough, be sponsoring the Best Design award (which covers every aspect of theatre design, from sets, lighting and costumes to hair and make-up design).

   The company’s founder, leading hair designer Scott Cooper, has strong theatre connections. His wife is the award-winning actor Nicole Cooper, who, just yesterday, ended the New York run of Scottish playwright Zinnie Harris’s play Macbeth (an undoing).

   As if that wasn’t enough, Scott’s brother is the acclaimed Scottish stage and screen actor Gordon Cooper.       

    I catch up with the hair designer in a popular bar on the southside of Glasgow. He explains why he decided to throw his company’s money behind the CATS awards.

   “I was sitting at last year’s CATS awards [at the Traverse Theatre in Edinburgh], and what I really liked, when I looked at the images of the nominees up on the screen, was that they were so diverse, in every way you could imagine”, Cooper says. “I loved that”, he enthuses.

   The hair designer was clearly impressed by the CATS awards’ celebration of the talents of diverse theatre artists from across Scotland’s communities. However, seeing the increasing diversity of Scottish theatre reflected on the Traverse screen also reminded him that there is considerable progress still to be made.     

_{The winners and guest presenters of the 2023 CATS awards. Photo: Infinite Blue Designs}

   The inclusivity suggested by the breadth of artists nominated in last year’s CATS awards “wasn’t everyone’s experience”, he explains. Cooper has always been particularly interested in hair design and care for people with curly hair, not least for people of African descent, such as himself.

   Consequently, he looks after the hair of many of Scotland’s actors of colour. “Without naming any names”, he says, he knows people in Scottish theatre “who haven’t been having such a positive experience.”

   In particular, he explains, many performers of colour in Scottish theatre (and this goes for the screen arts, too) aren’t being offered the hair design and care they require in their work environments. Actors of African descent, for example, are often told that the hair designers the company has don’t know how to deal with their hair.

   Consequently, these actors are often left to deal with the hair design for their stage roles themselves, while their white colleagues are looked after on set. Needless to say, this bothers Cooper, not least because it is such a hidden problem.

   “The assumption is, ‘they’re not complaining, so everybody must be happy’”, he comments. However, he argues, this assumption completely overlooks “how difficult it is to get a job as an actor, or in any other part of the industry.”

   It is, Cooper continues, “very difficult” for Black actors and other actors of colour to speak up. Which is why he, as someone who is at one remove from the theatre business, has decided to go public about an issue that is on-going in the stage and screen arts in Scotland.

   The hair designer is at pains to make it clear that his comments are not intended as a condemnation of the Scottish theatre industry. On the contrary, he is an enthusiastic supporter (having supported Glasgow’s Tron Theatre prior to his new sponsorship of the CATS awards).

   He is pleased by the strides forward in diversity and representation that the Scottish stage arts have made in recent years and decades. However, he believes that more can and should be done in the interests of racial equality within the business.

   “I’ve been around the theatre my whole life”, Cooper says. “My young daughters want to go into theatre.

   “I would love it if they could come into a theatre [where they were acting] and sit in a chair and not have to think about their hair and their make-up.”

   Cooper is speaking out, not only because of the experiences of some of his clients in the theatre business or the hoped for careers of his own daughters. He was also inspired by the speech given at last year’s CATS awards by Scots-Zambian playwright May Sumbwanyambe.

   The dramatist picked up the Best New Play and Best Production awards for Enough of Him, his powerful play about Scotland and slavery. He gave a passionate oration that included his thoughts on inclusivity and representation in Scottish theatre.

   “It marked my card a little bit”, Cooper says of Sumbwanyambe’s speech. After the playwright’s oration, the hair designer felt that he, too, needed to go public with his thoughts.

   What do his thoughts mean, in practical terms, for Scotland’s theatre companies? “When you say you want to be ‘inclusive’, when you use the term as widely and loosely as that, you have to be able to stand up to it”, he comments.

   In his own business, he aims to be inclusive in the sense of being able to look after all manner of clients, regardless of their hair type or their ethnicity. “Nobody can achieve absolute inclusivity ever, I would say”, Cooper opines. “What you can do is always be working towards it.”

   In practical terms, that means, he believes, that Scotland’s theatre companies need to be looking to bring in more hair and make-up designers who know how to cater to a wider variety of clients. This has to include, of course, actors of African descent.

   That should be done in tandem, Cooper continues, with training the theatres’ existing hair and make-up designers so that they can look after the full variety of actors on the Scottish stage.

   If his sponsorship of the CATS awards, and his subsequent comments in this interview, help Scottish theatre to make advances in this important area, Cooper will be a happy man.

This feature was originally published in the Sunday National on May 5, 2024

© Mark Brown

Review: Casablanca: The Gin Joint Cut, Perth Theatre

PLAY IT AGAIN, CLARE (SIMON AND KEVIN)

Casablanca: The Gin Joint Cut

Perth Theatre

Review by Mark Brown

_{Clare Waugh, Kevin Lennon and Simon Donaldson in Casablanca: The Gin Joint Cut. Photo: Tommy Ga-Ken Wan}

It is 13 years since Morag Fullarton’s Casablanca: The Gin Joint Cut (the screen-to-stage homage with the dangerously tongue-twisting title) first played to enraptured audiences at Glasgow’s Òran Mór venue. Since then, this hilariously reduced version of Michael Curtiz’s iconic 1942 movie has been performed to full houses in such exciting locations as Paris, London and… Dunoon.

   Now Fullarton directs the show – in which three actors play a dozen characters – for Perth Theatre. Martha Steed (who is credited in the programme under the curious title of “design coordinator”) has “coordinated” a smashing set which, in its evocation of the famous Rick’s Café from the movie, is a thing of opulence as compared with the charmingly frugal design offered at the Òran Mór back in 2011.

   However, Fullarton knows that much of the humour of the piece depends on its deliberately reduced efforts to evoke the film, whether it is by way of the miniaturised furniture in Rick’s office or a wooden statue standing in for Dooley Wilson’s much-loved pianist Sam.

   These elements of design are not the only points of continuity between the original production and this latest staging. Clare Waugh – who played a panoply of characters, including Ilsa Lund (famously, Ingrid Bergman’s role in the movie) and Nazi officer Major Heinrich Strasser, 13 years ago – returns with all the skill, energy and comic timing that fans of the show have come to expect of her.

   Back in the day, Waugh was joined by Gavin Mitchell (as Rick Blaine, among others) and Jimmy Chisholm (in numerous roles, including the unprincipled chief of police Captain Renault). Mitchell and Chisholm gave outstanding comic performances. Their unavailability now left two large pairs of theatrical shoes to fill.

   Fullarton has done so brilliantly by bringing in the superb Simon Donaldson (Rick etc.) and the equally fantastic Kevin Lennon (Renault et al). Between them the trio conjure up the kind of comic chemistry that has always been the bedrock of the play’s success.

   At the very outset we have metatheatrical introductions to the actors (including Donaldson ironing his trousers while trying out his Humphrey Bogart impressions and Waugh asking anxiously, “where’s my swastika?”). From that moment on the production achieves the perfect balance between fast-paced silliness and comically condensed storytelling.

   Donaldson swings entertainingly between a respectable impression of Bogart’s playing of the debonair Mr Blaine and delightfully humorous moments of exaggerated mime. Lennon is equally adept, not least in the hilarious scene in which (spinning on his heels while executing costume changes) he plays both Renault and the casually dignified resistance hero Victor Laszlo.

   The fabulous singer Jerry Burns sets the tone (and intervenes, stylishly and comically at various points during the show) in the role of the café’s sultry chanteuse. The ever-excellent Hilary Brooks provides piano accompaniment throughout, including during the production’s rousing moment of audience participation, the singing of La Marseillaise.

   This is a welcome return, then, for a Scottish theatrical gem. Thank goodness they’re playing it again.

Until March 30: perththeatreandconcerthall.com

This review was originally published in the Sunday National on March 24, 2024

© Mark Brown

Review: an Accident / a Life, Tramway, Glasgow

Dance-theatre

an Accident / a Life

Tramway, Glasgow

By Mark Brown

_{Marc Brew in an Accident/a Life. Photo: Filip Van Roe}

In 1997 the 20-year-old Australian dancer Marc Brew was involved in a car crash in South Africa, where he was travelling with friends. The vehicle he was travelling in was hit by another car, which had a drunk driver behind the wheel.

   Brew’s three companions died in the accident. He suffered catastrophic spinal injuries which rendered him unable to walk.

   The remarkable dance-theatre piece an Accident / a Life (making its UK premiere at Tramway) explores the immense emotional and physical challenges, as well as the memories and choices, created by this traumatic event. It is the work of Brew (who is currently based in Scotland) and the Flemish-Moroccan choreographer Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui.

   The show is played by Brew, with the occasional interventions of a small group of co-performers, who appear in the guise of crash test dummies.

   At the outset, the dancer lies prone on the ground, costumed as a test dummy. He is illuminated by the headlights of a real Fiat 126 car, flanked on either side by two sets of large, double video screens.

   Unmasked, Brew is transformed into himself, the artist who will narrate his story for us. He communicates both in speech and by way of the movement he has evolved through his relationship with what he calls his “new body”, the very differently functioning, disabled body created by the crash.

_{A scene from an Accident / a Life. Photo: Filip Van Roe}

   We are taken from the devastation of the accident, through Brew’s period of hospitalisation in South Africa to his re-emergence as a dancer and, ultimately, choreographer.

   His telling is notable for its absolute absence of self-pity. Indeed, his reflections – which are, by turns, sobering, emotive and surprisingly hilarious – brook no pity.

  Brew is assisted in his narration and recollection by an eclectic series of video works, a variety of music, an affecting soundscape and evocative lighting. For instance, in a moment that is typical of the production’s sense of humour, his youthful sojourn in South Africa is illustrated with standard images of a tourist safari which are set, with knowing irony, to the strains of American pop group Toto’s toe-curling 1982 anthem Africa.   

   In its more serious or contemplative moments, the show generates some compelling images. The raising of the car above the set on a chain is symbolic of the constant presence of the accident in Brew’s life.   

   Much of the screen work – from atmospheric, semi-abstract images to grainy film of the hospitalised Brew in the immediate aftermath of the accident – is reminiscent, in its elegiac contemplation of life and death, of American video artist Bill Viola’s work.

  There’s also real emotional impact in the homemade video of the artist’s mother talking, with humorously Australian matter-of-factness, about her instinctive decision to fly to South Africa to care for him after the accident.

   All-in-all, this is a startling, unique, powerfully honest work which will, one suspects, be the toast of the Norfolk and Norwich Festival when it plays there in May.

Ends at Tramway Saturday, March 23: tramway.org; plays Norwich Theatre Royal, May 24-25: nnfestival.org.uk

This review was first published on the website of the Daily Telegraph on March 23, 2024

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/dance/what-to-see/an-accident-a-life-marc-brew-norwich-festival

© Mark Brown

Review: A Taste of Honey, Royal Exchange, Manchester

A Taste of Honey

Royal Exchange, Manchester

By Mark Brown

_{Rowan Robinson (Jo) and Jill Halfpenny (Helen) in A Taste of Honey. Photo: Johan Persson}

Set in Salford, Shelagh Delaney’s iconic drama A Taste of Honey was first staged (at Theatre Royal Stratford East) by Joan Littlewood’s Theatre Workshop in 1958. It isn’t difficult to see why it took an artistic and political radical like Littlewood to bring the piece to the public stage.

   The play portrayed an unmarried 17-year-old white woman getting pregnant by her 20-year-old black boyfriend. Moreover, it featured a positive representation of a gay man some nine years before homosexuality was decriminalised in England.

   If the stage premiere was controversial, the cinema release, in 1961, of Tony Richardson’s film (with a screenplay by Delaney herself) sent shockwaves through British society.

   All of which begs the question: “why stage Delaney’s drama now?” Emma Baggott (who directs this new production for the Royal Exchange) seems to offer two equally convincing answers to this question.

   Firstly, for all the social progress we have made since 1958, a number of the play’s themes (such as teenage pregnancy) still carry an undeniable currency. Secondly, A Taste of Honey is a brilliantly written, beautifully structured work of theatre, as worthy of revival as the socially conscious dramas of Henrik Ibsen.

   An intimate theatre-in-the-round, the Royal Exchange presents a number of problems for both theatre artists and audiences. The most serious of these is that, whichever way they turn, an actor always has their back to a significant proportion of the audience.

   Designer Peter Butler attempts to ameliorate this difficulty with a circular brick road, but there’s only so much cyclical perambulation that one can shoehorn into a drama. With no walls to play with, Butler has to settle for devices such as grills on the ground, which emit atmospheric light and smoke. 

_{Obadiah as Jimmie and Rowan Robinson as Jo. Photo: Johan Persson}

   The unforgiving nature of the theatre’s performance space notwithstanding, it is remarkable just how much of the passion and pathos of Delaney’s play is actually conveyed by Baggott’s staging. This is down in large part to a universally excellent cast, led by the superb Rowan Robinson, who has shades of a young Jane Horrocks in her portrayal of Jo, the drama’s vulnerable-yet-steely teenager.

   The scene in which Jo finds herself alone with Peter (the nasty spiv who is set to marry Jo’s neglectful mother, Helen) is remarkably potent. Jo’s flirtation with Peter (who is performed with perfect vulgarity by Andrew Sheridan) oozes contempt, both for Helen and her hideous lover.

   Jill Halfpenny’s Helen is suitably monstrous, but with an intelligent, underlying and brittle fragility. There are also fine and sympathetic performances from Obadiah (as Jo’s sailor boyfriend Jimmie) and David Moorst (Jo’s gay housemate Geoffrey).

   Singer Nishla Smith – whose renderings of Ewan MacColl’s classic Salford folk song Dirty Old Town top and tail the production effectively – functions as a kind of unobtrusive guardian angel throughout the play. It’s a neat touch that reminds us of the dream-like aspect to a play that is so often considered to be the quintessence of British “kitchen sink” realism.

Until April 13. Tickets: 0161 833 9833; royalexchange.co.uk

This review was first published on the website of the Daily Telegraph on March 21, 2024

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/theatre/what-to-see/a-taste-of-honey-manchester-royal-exchange-review

© Mark Brown

Review: Blue Beard, Royal Lyceum, Edinburgh

Review

Blue Beard

Royal Lyceum, Edinburgh

By Mark Brown

_{Mirabelle Gremaud (magician’s assistant) and Tristan Sturrock (Blue Beard). Photo: Steve Tanner}

The folkloric myth of Bluebeard – the wealthy man with the azure facial hair and a dark, brutal secret – has been embedded in European culture by the French fairytale writer Charles Perrault and Bluebeard’s Castle, the opera by the Hungarian composer Béla Bartók. We can now add to that cultural history Emma Rice’s Blue Beard, a new, highly distinctive stage adaptation of the story that is simultaneously timeless, powerfully modern and magnificently theatrical.

   It is, perhaps, a sign of the pecuniary difficulties that theatre currently finds itself in throughout the UK that this show is co-produced by no fewer than five companies (namely: the Royal Lyceum, Edinburgh; Birmingham Rep; HOME Manchester; York Theatre Royal; and Rice’s own, Bristol-based company Wise Children). Whatever the reason for the proliferation of producers, there is, pleased to report, no question of too many metaphorical cooks spoiling the artistic broth.

   Written and directed by the acclaimed Rice, this piece – which combines dramatic storytelling with live music and song, stage illusions, and vaudevillian performance – is an unforgettably brilliant work of total theatre. Here Blue Beard (Tristan Sturrock on impressively smooth, charismatic and sinister form) is a famous stage magician.

   His repertoire of spectacular tricks combines with a line in hedonistic hospitality to give him a certain attraction. This is especially true of Lucky (Robyn Sinclair), who attended a Blue Beard magic show along with her mother (named Treasure, and played by Patrycja Kujawska) and her sister (Trouble, played by Stephanie Hockley).

_{The nuns of the Convent of the Three Fs. Photo: Steve Tanner}

   This fabulously staged tale of showmanship and Bacchanalian excess is a story told to a young man, the Lost Brother (Adam Mirsky), by the blue-bearded Mother Superior (Katy Owen) of the very 21^st-century Convent of the Three F’s (“Fearful, Fast and Furious”). The narrative disclosed by this unconventional cleric moves forward in tandem with the Lost Brother’s story of his Lost Sister (Mirabelle Gremaud), a not unusually troubled young woman who found solace in her nascent career as a rock musician.

   The two tales (one rooted strongly in folklore, the other a contemporary story that is increasingly, and horrifyingly, recognisable) unfold with a colourful, hilarious, violent dynamism that is utterly compelling. Composer Stu Barker’s music draws widely on Slavonic folk music, jazz and rock music (among others).

   The technical work (whether representing stage tricks or summoning up illusions in ever-whirling pieces of furniture or kitchen appliances) is as breathtaking as Vicki Mortimer’s dazzling set and costume designs. Indeed, Rice and her team ensure that every element of the piece – from the universally superb acting, musicianship and singing, to the atmospheric lighting and sound – is at the service of an overarching aesthetic vision.

   This flawlessly absorbing production entertains and amuses, even as it travels further into the dark heart of the famous folk tale. It does so all the better to serve us with a genuinely powerful coup de théâtre that honours the many women – from Sarah Everard and Zara Aleena in England, to Jîna Emînî in Iran – who have died at the hands of violent men.

At the Royal Lyceum, Edinburgh until March 30: lyceum.co.uk    

This review was originally published in the Sunday National on March 17, 2024

© Mark Brown

Review: Richard, My Richard, Shakespeare North Playhouse, Prescot

THEATRE

Richard, My Richard

Shakespeare North Playhouse, Prescot

By Mark Brown

_{Tori Burgess (Anne Neville) and Kyle Rowe (Richard III). Photo: Patch Dolan}

Philippa Gregory is long established as one of the UK’s most popular historical novelists. The author of such bestsellers as The Other Boleyn Girl and The White Queen, she has now, in Richard, My Richard, turned her attention to the stage for the first time.

   The popular imagination of Richard III – whose remains were, famously, reburied at Leicester Cathedral in 2015, having been discovered under a car park in the city – is, thanks to William Shakespeare, that of a blood-soaked, hunchbacked villain. Gregory paints a more complex picture of the last Plantagenet king.

   Moreover – as one would expect of an author who has often tried to restore agency to the women of England’s royal history – the play seeks to bring centre stage important female players in Richard’s story. These include his ill-fated wife Anne Neville and Elizabeth Woodville (the queen of Richard’s predecessor, his brother King Edward IV).

   Gregory’s claims to historical accuracy have led to criticism by historians in the past. With this play – whilst her voluminous research into The Wars of the Roses has been brought very substantially to the table – the veracity of the historical record itself is under scrutiny.

   So much so, in fact, that History is a (male, academic and occasionally misogynistic) character in its own right (and one played with passion and increasing uncertainty by Tom Kanji).

   However, Gregory’s characterisation of History creates something of a structural problem for the play. One can’t help but feel that, in tackling so many figures and events in a play that runs to two hours and 15 minutes (including interval), she might have bitten off a little more than she can chew.

   In Act One she seeks to represent the full complexities of the various rivalries and alliances (nuances that get lost in Shakespeare’s portrayal of Richard as a devious, bloody uber-villain). However, as History interrupts and intervenes, the play fails to achieve the necessary sense of pace and rhythm (a weakness that is less pronounced in Act Two, which is less reliant on Kanji’s character and, therefore, more theatrically inclined). Too often, the dialogue of the historical characters serves, not to drive the narrative forward, but to offer historical context.

   There are some fine performances: not least from Jennifer Matter as a powerfully resentful Queen Elizabeth and Laura Smithers as the ambitious and religious Lady Margaret Beaufort (mother of the first Tudor king, Henry VII). However, Kyle Rowe’s Richard (although, mercifully, freed from the distastefully demonic hunched back) rarely rises above a two-dimensional image of alpha-male malevolence. This might reflect shortcomings on the part of director Katie Posner or limitations in Rowe’s acting (or, indeed, both).

   The production enjoys some atmospheric music and occasional flashes of (often feministic) humour. However, particularly in its uncomfortably uneven first half, it succumbs to the tensions between representing history and creating theatrical drama.

At Shakespeare North Playhouse, Prescot until March 30; tickets: 0151 433 7156, shakespearenorthplayhouse.co.uk. Then at Theatre Royal, Bury St Edmunds, April 11-27.

A slightly edited version of this review was first published on the website of the Daily Telegraph on March 13, 2024

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/theatre/what-to-see/richard-my-richard-shakespeare-north-playhouse-review

© Mark Brown

Review: Hamilton, Festival Theatre, Edinburgh

Hamilton

Festival Theatre, Edinburgh

Reviewed by Mark Brown

_{Shaq Taylor (centre) as Alexander Hamilton. Photo: Danny Kaan}

Few Broadway musicals make their Scottish premiere having already achieved the legendary status that attaches to Hamilton, Lin-Manuel Miranda’s 2015 dramatisation of the life of the American revolutionary and statesman Alexander Hamilton. As much a history play as a biographical drama, the show (which is embarking on a tour of the UK and Ireland) has been inundated with awards and critical plaudits.

  Boasting a superb musical score and choreography that are rooted in hip-hop culture, the musical has captured the socio-cultural zeitgeist by casting non-white performers in most roles. Indeed, it is a crucial feature of the show that founding fathers of the United States – such as George Washington (leader of American Revolution and first president of the US), Thomas Jefferson (third president of the US) and Hamilton himself – are played by people of colour.

   Miranda describes his show as a musical that is about “America then, as told by America now.” However, its multi-ethnic cast is not only reflective of US society in the 21^st-century, it also speaks powerfully to the history of “race” (that most destructive of pseudo-scientific concepts) in America.

   Famously (or infamously), a majority of the founding fathers, including Washington and Jefferson, were slave owners. By contrast, Hamilton (the orphaned son, born out of wedlock, of white colonists in the Caribbean) was a noted campaigner for the abolition of slavery: a fact that highlights the paradoxes and conflicts around race and racism that have afflicted American society throughout its turbulent history. 

   The bedrock of the show’s success is its originality, both within the stage musical genre and the popular re-telling of US history (Miranda’s book and lyrics are inspired by Ron Chernow’s 2004 biography of Hamilton). It is, in many ways, opposite to other popular Broadway musicals (such as Disney’s all-conquering The Lion King, for example), which are successful due to their adherence to artistic conventions and their assiduous meeting of audience expectations.

   With Hamilton, the music and dance, rather than traditional stage effects, provide the spectacle. The nine-year success of the show has brought with it bigger budgets, but, sensibly, the producers have remained true to the relatively simple staging of the original.

_{The company of Hamilton. Photo: Danny Kaan}

   David Korins’s set is a beautiful and ingeniously utilitarian, wood-dominated period affair. Paul Tazewell’s costumes are gorgeously tidy-but-accurate. Crucially, however, both facilitate (rather than substitute for) the show’s performative dynamism.

   Director Thomas Kail’s staging has that dynamism in abundance. The performers (who were cast in the UK for this tour) are universally impressive: from the appropriately charismatic and fiery Shaq Taylor (Hamilton), to the brilliantly flamboyant Billy Nevers (as both the Marquis de Lafayette and Jefferson) and the fabulously-voiced Aisha Jawando (this production’s standout singer, playing Hamilton’s sister-in-law Angelica Schuyler).

   The score includes not only hip-hop, but also soul, alongside mainstream pop and songs in the stage musical-style. Of course, some numbers – such as the famous My Shot and The Room Where It Happens – present themselves as show stoppers, but there truly isn’t a weak link in the score. Indeed, it’s extraordinary how much of the story – from Hamilton’s humble origins, through his early political pamphleteering, the Revolutionary War and his self-destructive private life – is told in the lyrics.

   The show’s interpretation of history is, inevitably, a tad loose at times. In particular, Britain’s King George III is represented as an absolute monarch (whereas England had not had such a thing since 1649, when Cromwell’s republican revolution beheaded Charles I). However, as Daniel Boys’s wonderfully funny performance (which carries a few neat allusions to our current monarch, Charles III) attests, a dandyish king has far greater entertainment value than the period’s Tory prime minister, Lord Frederick North: there are few lines in the musical that are more humorous than King George’s pronouncement that, “I will send a fully-armed battalion to remind you of my love.”

   Huge credit is due to Alex Lacamoire for his musical arrangements and orchestration, and to Andy Blankenbuehler for his choreography. Both contribute hugely to the amazing sense of energy that defies the show’s almost three-hour length (including interval). 

   Hamilton is one Broadway musical that absolutely lives up to the hype. Beg, borrow or start a revolution for a ticket.

At the Festival Theatre, Edinburgh until April 27: hamiltonmusical.com

This review was originally published in the Sunday National on March 10, 2024

© Mark Brown

Review: Escaped Alone, Tron Theatre, Glasgow

Escaped Alone

Tron Theatre, Glasgow

Reviewed by Mark Brown

_{Blythe Duff in Escaped Alone. Photo: Mihael Bodlovic}

Caryl Churchill – the author of such modern classics as Top Girls (1982) and Cloud 9 (1979) – is one of the most inventive and fascinating dramatists of the 20^th and 21^st centuries. Artistically, she is a product of the explosion in modernist playwriting that brought us such writers as Gertrude Stein, Bertolt Brecht and Samuel Beckett.

   In addition to its pronounced defiance of the laws of dramatic naturalism (such as the linear narrative), her work has always had a strong political dimension. Her 2009 piece Seven Jewish Children – A Play for Gaza was denounced as “horrifically anti-Israel” by the Board of Deputies of British Jews.

   However, it was defended as “dense, beautiful [and] elusive” by American playwright Tony Kushner and, his compatriot, academic Alisa Solomon (both of whom are Jewish). In 2022 she was stripped of the European Drama Award (which had been given to her by the Schauspiel Stuttgart in recognition of her life’s work) due to her support for BDS (Boycott Divestment and Sanctions) against Israel.

_{From left to right: Anne Kidd, Joanna Tope, Irene Macdougall and Blythe Duff. Photo: Mihaela Bodlovic}

   It is in these artistic and political contexts that we should consider director Joanna Bowman’s new production of Churchill’s short 2016 play Escaped Alone for the Tron theatre company. The piece is set among four older women: relative outsider Mrs Jarrett (Blythe Duff), Lena (Anne Kidd), Vi (Irene Macdougall) and Sally (Joanna Tope).

   Familiar, perhaps friendly with each other, these characters are sitting together in a garden chatting. The prosaic nature of their initial conversations is disturbed by a creeping, formal jaggedness.

   Over time further complications are suggested by Sally’s extreme phobia of cats and Vi’s revelation of a life-altering event from her past (which, it transpires, was witnessed by Sally). There is, in these conversations, a subtle sabotaging of social conventions that is reminiscent of the plays of Harold Pinter.

   However, in the other aspect of the piece – a series of monologues delivered by Mrs Jarrett on a raised platform behind the garden – any sense of reassuring domesticity is exploded entirely. Here, in speeches of terrifying descriptiveness and bleak absurdism, we are told of horrendous dystopian catastrophes.

   We hear of huge numbers of people being killed or driven to desperate means of survival by an aquatic tsunami or widespread chemical poisoning. Yet, these monologues have a defamiliarising, darkly comic dimension.

   Far from creating recognisable images of apocalypse, the catalyst in these events is often an aspect of the modern economic system or popular culture. Seemingly incompatible or unrelated concepts collide disconcertingly as Duff’s character relates the events with a poetic detachedness.

   The play shifts constantly beneath our feet, constantly calling into question the supposedly coherent sense that the powerful try to impose on the chaotic world in which we live.

   Bowman’s production rises to the challenges of Churchill’s uncertain and disturbing text. It is blessed with four excellent performances, and with a sharp, contrasting set, exceptional video and sound, and memorably innovative lighting.

At the Tron Theatre, Glasgow until March 9; then at the Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh, March 13-16: tron.co.uk

This review was originally published in the Sunday National on March 3, 2024

© Mark Brown

Review: Two Sisters, Royal Lyceum, Edinburgh (Sunday National)

CARAVAN OF CLICHÉS

Two Sisters

Royal Lyceum, Edinburgh

Reviewed by Mark Brown

_{Shauna Macdonald in Two Sisters. Photo: Jess Shurte}

David Greig – the playwright who has, since 2016, been artistic director of the Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh, and the author of such excellent and eclectic dramas as The Architect, Dr Korczak’s Example and Casanova – is widely considered (including by me) to be one of Scotland’s finest stage writers. Which leaves me (and, I suspect, a significant proportion of the Lyceum audience) at a loss to explain Two Sisters.

   The play is the first original drama (as opposed to adaptation) of his own that Greig has programmed at the Lyceum. To say it is a disappointment would be like saying that Jacob Rees-Mogg is annoying (i.e. accurate but entirely insufficient).  

   Set in Holiday Heaven (a dog-eared, cliff top caravan park in Fife), the play (which is a co-production between the Lyceum and the Malmö Stadtsteater) is teeth-grindingly clichéd and predictable. Thirtysomething Emma (the ever-excellent Jess Hardwick), a pregnant corporate lawyer and wannabe fiction author who is unfulfilled by her boring marriage to a Christian businessman, has decided to use a caravan at the park (the location of family holidays during her childhood) as a writer’s retreat.

   Amy (the never-less-than-superb Shauna Macdonald), Emma’s slightly older TV staffer sister, is cursed (or blessed, according to taste) with a super-active libido. She arrives in search of shelter following her longsuffering husband’s discovery of her latest multiple affairs.

   These caricatures are confirmed, with Emma wearing a long, relaxed white dress and sandals (looking like a wholesome extra from The Waltons), while Amy appears like Tina Turner circa 1985 (all black, leather miniskirt and studded stiletto heels).

   The catalyst in the women’s ensuing midlife crises scenarios is Lance, the holiday camp’s longstanding caretaker and DJ (a self-described Fifer with an incongruously Swedish accent). Played by Erik Olsson, he is a two-dimensional, dope-smoking, yoga-practising hippy, and a hit with the gaggle of teenagers who, inexplicably, hang around Holiday Heaven.

   Anyone who saw the unforgettably brilliant üBUNG, by Flemish company Victoria, when it came to Glasgow way back in 2001 (or, in more recent times, the work of the astonishing, but sadly now defunct, Glasgow youth company Junction 25) knows that deeply profound work with teenagers is possible if the young people are properly invested in it. By contrast, in moments that are excruciatingly anti-theatrical, Greig asks the young chorus to read out audience members’ memories of their teenage years between scenes, before putting them at the service of some ludicrously histrionic moments of melodrama towards the end.

   Given the disastrous shortcomings of the script, it’s hard to see what the talented director Wils Wilson could have done to improve matters (apart, perhaps, from advise Greig that sensible Emma would be extremely unlikely to drink herself into a memory-erasing stupor while pregnant). Asking award-winning actors such as Hardwick and Macdonald to perform this nonsense is akin to giving Olympic swimmers a paddling pool to play in.

   Two Sisters is, surely, the worst Greig drama to ever land on a stage. It’s certainly an embarrassment to the illustrious Lyceum.

Until March 2: lyceum.org.uk

This review was originally published in the Sunday National on February 25, 2024

© Mark Brown

Review: Two Sisters, Royal Lyceum, Edinburgh (Daily Telegraph)

THEATRE

Two Sisters

Royal Lyceum, Edinburgh

By Mark Brown

_{Jess Hardwick and Shauna Macdonald in Two Sisters. Pic: Jess Shurte}

David Greig, the current artistic director of Edinburgh’s Royal Lyceum Theatre, is one of Scotland’s most prolific and critically acclaimed dramatists. In a long and distinguished career he has created such brilliant and diverse plays as Europe, Dr Korczak’s Example and The Strange Undoing of Prudencia Hart.

   Sad to say, however, that his latest stage work, Two Sisters, is arguably the worst play in his considerable dramatic output. A co-production between the Lyceum and the Malmö Stadtsteater of Sweden, it is a horribly misconceived, cliché-riddled and predictable midlife crisis drama.

   Set in a declining, Scottish caravan park called Holiday Heaven, it brings together sisters Emma (a successful corporate lawyer, who is pregnant and, seemingly, in a loving and stable marriage with a wealthy businessman) and Amy (a creative industries worker and serial adulterer).

   Emma (Jess Hardwick), who intends to become a fiction author, has rented a caravan at the park (where she and Amy were brought on holidays in their childhoods) as a writer’s retreat. Those plans are overturned by Amy (Shauna Macdonald), who turns up seeking refuge following her husband’s latest exposure of her infidelities.

   The sisters are not so much well drawn characters as roughly sketched stereotypes. Even their attire (a relaxed, downtime white dress for Emma, and universally black leather jacket, miniskirt and studded stilettos for Amy) is the stuff of cliché.

   The same is true of the park’s caretaker, DJ (and, back in the day, Amy’s first love) Lance. An ageing hippy who does yoga and cannabis, and has a great record collection, his only original feature is that, while claiming that “Fife is all I know”, he speaks (courtesy of actor Erik Olsson, of Wallander fame) with a strong Scandinavian accent.

   These half-baked characters are surrounded by a chorus of non-professional teenage actors. Spare a thought for the young performers, as their principal task – interrupting the action on a semi-regular basis to read out audience members’ recollections of their teenage years – is so awkward and disruptive that it borders on the theatrically criminal.

   Which is not to suggest that the play would have generated much momentum without these ill-judged interjections. It’s hard to imagine what Wils Wilson (an experienced director with a strong track record) could have done to save Greig’s drama from itself.

   The play’s title nods to Chekhov, but that’s where any meaningful comparison to the Russian bard ends. The heavily signposted moments of late melodrama that function as Greig’s supposed “twists” are sub-Chekhovian drivel.

   So poor is this offering that one wishes that Emma could break from the action, Pirandello-style, and start drawing up a legal case against it. The charge sheet – beginning with the catastrophic wasting of the talents of excellent, award-winning actors Hardwick and Macdonald – would be a long one.   

   We can only hope that, in this dreadful two hours and 40 minutes, Greig has got his desire to dramatise the midlife crisis out of his system.

At the Royal Lyceum, Edinburgh until March 2. Tickets: 0131 248 4848; lyceum.org.uk

This review was first published on the website of the Daily Telegraph on February 16, 2024

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/theatre/what-to-see/two-sisters-royal-lyceum-edinburgh-david-greig

© Mark Brown