ARCHES, GLASGOW
WEE FAIRY TALES ***CITIZENS' THEATRE, GLASGOW
HELLO DOLLY! **EDINBURGH FESTIVAL THEATRE
THE year is 1984, and in the kitchen of a rundown thatched house beside a country road somewher
e in Ireland, a very old woman lies propped up on the big, ramshackle bed, telling an apparently endless story of a an evening long ago.
Her granddaughter, Mary, plods around her, enduring abuse while she changes soiled sheets and brings endless cups of tea to the old woman, who neither likes nor even recognises her. Later in the evening, Mary and Mommo receive a visit from Mary's sister, Dolly, a single mother with an abusive absentee husband, a rackety sex life, and a small problem that's becoming bigger and more obvious with every passing month.
This is Bailegangaire, or "Town Without Laughter", the remarkable 1985 play that helped to put Tom Murphy up alongside Brian Friel as one of the great masters of modern Irish playwriting; and it would not be unfair to describe this strange but compelling piece of theatre as a kind of female Waiting For Godot, so clearly does it belong to that same strand of fluent and earthy Irish absurdism reflected in the work of writers from James Joyce to Flann O'Brien to Samuel Beckett.
Over two hours, as the play unfolds, the granddaughters gradually switch from a routine exasperation with Mommo's interminable telling of a story, to a desperate drive, at least on Mary's part, to get the tale finished, so that life can move on.
The story itself is a fantastic, rambling affair about a laughing contest between a bully-boy and a stranger in a bar. But its elaborate detail conceals a tragedy painfully close to home, with hints of more grief and horror beyond. And so the story, and the battle to complete it, becomes a grand metaphor for the way Ireland uses compulsive storytelling to both celebrate and evade its past; and for the huge courage it takes to bring one story to an end, and begin another.
Andy Arnold's final production as artistic director of the Arches is not perfect – the whole show, with its massive repetitive text, still looks a shade under-rehearsed. But at its centre, it has a trio of formidable, infinitely watchable performances – from Kay Gallie as Mommo, Kathleen MacInnes as Dolly, and a magnificent Muireann Kelly as Mary – in a production that, in characteristically intelligent Arnold style, never misses a stroke of the superb self-awareness and wit that shapes Murphy's play.
As Arnold moves on to the Tron, this show marks a fine conclusion to an artistic directorship that has not only forged a powerful, essential link between Scottish theatre and a brilliant century of Irish drama, but has also often provided tremendous opportunities for women artists to show the fine creative stuff of which they are made.
It's a brute fact, about the various forms of Scots spoken in Scotland, that in most people's experience the language still falls far short of the fine and literate Irish-English deployed by playwrights like Tom Murphy; and now that Scots is to form part of our school curriculum, some of those shortcomings are likely to be sharply exposed. TAG Theatre's latest show for young children, Wee Fairy Tales, which is based on Matthew Fitt and James Robertson's delightful Wee Book o' Fairy Tales in Scots, plunges straight into the front line of this debate; and immediately runs into a couple of barriers. The first is the rank incomprehension of many young children, who may still hear fragments of Scots around them, but are not used to listening to it with any attention or respect. And the second is the attitude to the language internalised by Scottish actors themselves, who often, through their tone and body language, perpetuate the cliche that if they're talking in Scots, there must be something vulgar or aggressive going on.
It's therefore interesting to note that the further Jeremy Raison's simple three-handed production moves from those stereotypes, the better it works. The story of Rumpelstiltskin, featuring the lovely Judith Wiliams as the besieged princess threatened with the loss of her first-born child, is a superb little ten-minute drama; the Billy Goats Gruff is all bluster and rudeness, and far less effective. Back in the 1980s, a whole raft of Scottish writers set out to extend the range of what modern Scots language could do, into realms of poetry, lyricism, desire and grandeur from which it had long been exile. It's time, I think, for another push in that direction.
The story behind Jerry Herman's smash-hit 1960's musical Hello Dolly! has been one of the ruins that showbiz knocked about a bit, ever since it first appeared in 1835 and it can rarely have looked more in need of a fresh script job than it does in the ultra-traditional and numbingly undemanding production playing at the Festival Theatre this week. What's interesting about the show is just how retro and out of time its upbeat Americanism looks; clearly, if the 20th was the American century, we're now into something completely different.
Anita Dobson, in the title role, sparkles as best she can; and she delivers an engagingly camp performance as the famous Manhattan matchmaker who somehow persuades us that marrying a nasty, tight-fisted millionaire for his money is the right and romantic thing to do – so long as the year is 1900, and the place that legendary, long-lost dream of New York.
&149 Bailegangaire until 8 March; Wee Fairy Tales at the Byre Theatre, St Andrews, today and tomorrow; Hello Dolly! until tomorrow.
The full article contains 942 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
