GLASGOW produces shoestring theatre companies by the handful, a new one every year; but few of them burst onto the scene with such an impressive escape velocity as Andy Corelli's CorCor! company, which staged this cracking double bill at the Ramshorn
last week.
Working with young writer Cormac Quinn, the company presents two brief, intense dramas for two female actors, set in different kinds of limbo.
In Still, Ach and Agus are in a strange place beyond death, conscious that they are there because of some experience that linked their fates. Gradually, an archetypal 21st-century story of political violence emerges; and if the writing is sometimes so lyrical and metaphysical that the narrative seems drowned in subjective experience, the ending has immense power.
In Signs Of Life, two female astronauts, Eve and Amelia, are on a mission to find the source of a signal that may indicate the presence of alien life. In one sense, this is a conventional portrait of two women without men – they bicker constantly, and flirt with any man who appears on their radio link. Eventually Eve – brilliantly played by Shian Denovan – starts to talk about a lost crew member, Christopher, and to claim she is pregnant by him.
As the play matures over 30 minutes, though, it raises ever more disturbing questions about which of these two women has really lost touch with reality, with the strangeness of the universe we inhabit, and with the pulse of life itself; and both Denovan and her sparring-partner, Fiona Morrison, give outstanding, well-shaped performances, in a play that blazes with promise.
The full article contains 279 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
