Mumble Theatre

A Play, a Pie and a Pint
Oran Mor
Glasgow
Oct 2nd-7th

Script:  Stagecraft:  Performance: 

Trips to the toilet, cups of tea, banging your head on the desk, these are standard diversions for any scribbler with writer’s block. Time to get your mother out the cupboard and have a chat with her urn; after all it is the tenth anniversary of her passing.

Ivan (Stephen Clyde) looks back a decade, reflecting on the relationship between his mother and himself at the time she discovers she is dying. Fifty years of smoking has lead to terminal lung cancer, ashes to ashes indeed but this is a woman who knows her own mind. No daft bucket list of extreme sports thank you, she is happy in her own home. Besides, every time she’s out and coughs, the neighbours phone their weans to get their name down for the hoose. Clyde handles this demanding one-man performance with confidence, zinging Glasgow barbs in the voice of Ivan and his mother, as both use humour to cope with impending loss.

Events in Ian Pattison’s excellent play, the shift of control, the need for the younger person to communicate in the world of the older, the physical indignities, all will be familiar to those who have experienced loss of an elderly parent. An engaging piece of theatre that is poignant, funny and true.

Reviewer : David G Moffat

The Citizens Theatre, Glasgow, has unveiled the cast for its production of Cinderella – an alternative festive experience to round off 2017. Cinderella is recommended for ages 6+ and runs from 28 Nov – 31 Dec

Glaswegians young and old can expect a fun and lively re-telling of this classic fairytale, with plenty of the hallmark ingredients that have earned the Citizens Theatre a reputation for unique Christmas shows.  Citizens Theatre Artistic Director Dominic Hill – alongside his frequent collaborator, composer Nikola Kodjabashia – will bring his inimitable style to this production, deploying a handpicked ensemble cast to present this familiar story of magic and true love, with a twist. Peter Collins, whose comic performances have been at the heart of the theatre’s past two Christmas shows, returns to the company for his third festive season in a row. Peter’s most recent appearance at the Citizens was in Dominic Hill’s highly acclaimed production of The Oresteia: This Restless House (2017). Also returning to the Citizens stage for Cinderella is Irene Allan, whose performance as the Witch in Hansel & Gretel (2016) was described by the Daily Record as “utterly fabulous.” This year, she takes on the role of Cinderella’s stepmother.
Caroline Deyga, in her Citizens debut, is expected to wow audiences with the voice and spirit that saw her jointly nominated for ‘Best Actress in a Supporting Role’ at the Olivier Awards 2017, as part of the eight-strong cast of the award winning Our Ladies of Perpetual Succour (NTS). She will be joined by fellow Citz debutant Hannah Howie who, alongside Deyga, will bring her ‘strong comic timing’ (The Stage) to the production as one of Cinderella’s ugly sisters.  As part of the theatre’s commitment to nurturing new talent, the Citizens is putting its two Actor Interns Nicholas Ralph and Sinéad Sharkey centre stage for this production. Nicholas’s internship is funded by the Robertson Trust.

Jatinder Singh Randhawa in SNOWFLAKE & the Pleasance, 2017

The company is also delighted to welcome to the stage Jatinder Singh Randhawa, who will be taking a break from the Citizens Theatre’s front of house team. Jatinder recently graduated from North Lanarkshire College with a BA in Acting.  The cast is completed by actor and physical theatre practioner Malcolm Shields, who brings over two decades of experience on stage and screen to this production. Last year Malcolm made a memorable cameo in Ken Loach’s I, Daniel Blake and first appeared at the Citz as Franco Begbie in the theatre’s landmark 1994 adaptation of Trainspotting.

Family tickets for Cinderella start from £33.50 for a family of three to £77.50 for a family of five. You can purchase tickets here.

A Play, a Pie and a Pint
Oran Mor, Glasgow
25-30 September

Script:  Stagecraft:  Performance: 

Inside a Far East prison a young couple sit at a table awaiting the arrival of a lawyer. Incarcerated for the last 22 days, their prospects seem as dim as the flickering bulb that lights the dubious stains on the walls of the interview room. If Freya (Kim Allan) and Michael (Daniel Cameron) are to be saved from the most severe of punishments they must tell Amelia (Nicole Cooper), their legal representative, everything that happened before they caught the plane in Brisbane. Both have reasons to be economical with the truth but the fact is, somehow, someway, something illegal got into their luggage.

Allan’s Freya is convincing as a feisty, defiant teenager, impatiently demanding the legal system realises they are not foreign but British. Cameron’s Michael is timid, prone to despair, more likely than his travelling companion to turn to tears when the going gets tough. He wears shorts, she wears the trousers. Cooper’s Amelia is a calm presence carefully teasing out the truth, laying out the options, curtailing the more outlandish hopes of the accused – the UK is unlikely to revoke trade deals to ensure their release (well not with Brexit looming).

Writer Rob Drummond’s satisfying play moves to the Traverse in Edinburgh next week, where its serpentine plot will keep the audience guessing right till the end.

Reviewer : David G Moffat

A Play, A Pie and A Pint
Oran Mor, Glasgow
Sept 18-24

Script:  Stagecraft:  Performance: 

With sexual ambiguity and sharp dialogue, there are shades of Orton in this black comedy by Ian Cowell. Suburban couple Peter (George Drennan) and Grace (Anne Lacey) have been together for over 40 years and are at that intuitive plateau where words are not needed. If he taps his empty glass rapidly, the little lady knows it’s time to put down her knitting, fetch the malt and serve him another whisky. What could be more normal? Perhaps the longevity of their relationship is cemented by a hobby they share, even though it does tend to leave a bit of a mess in the darkness of the wine cellar and some digging to be done in the garden.

Once again they’re looking for a new tenant for the spare room and when a mysterious, handsome young man appears, keen to rent the space, the new lodger (Matthew Tomlinson) arouses the interest of Grace… and Peter. Drennan and Lacey are subtly convincing as the staid domestic couple about to have an additional layer of weirdness added to their already strange life by Tomlinson’s lively, double-dealing interloper. A mention should be given to Andy McGregor’s direction, which contrasts the early sedate sufficiency of the couple with the parlour game chaos of the trio at the end, a treat to watch throughout.

Reviewer : David G Moffat

Brunton Theatre

14th September 2017

Script:  Stagecraft:  Performance: 

During the madness that is the Edinburgh Fringe I saw that Matthew Zajac was performing in a new self-penned play, The Sky is Safe. After seeing Matthew in his extremely excellent ‘Tailor of Inverness’ of 2016 I didn’t want to dilute the experience, & so gladly opted to wait until it toured itself into the Brunton Theatre the other night. I was glad to wait, for I found the play to be a highly intellectual, explicitly detailed & ultimately satisfying slice of theatre. Of the play’s substance, in an earlier interview with the Mumble, Matthew told us;

In 2012 I was stranded in Istanbul for nine days while I waited for an Iranian visa which eventually was refused due to my UK nationality… I had a couple of interesting encounters on Istanbul’s streets and wrote about them. Last year I was pondering a new project for Dogstar and remembered the Istanbul experience. I learned that there were now around 350,000 Syrian refugees in the city and I decided to try to marry my earlier experience with that of Syrian women trying to make a life in the city. In March this year, I returned to Istanbul and, with the help of a local NGO, I had the great privilege of meeting and interviewing a number of Syrian women in their homes. A lot of what Amal, the female character in The Sky Is Safe comes from these interviews.

The central theme of the play is the relationship between Matthew’s Scottish gentleman, Gordon, & the female refugee, Amal, played with consummate confidence by Dana Hajaj. The story leaps from place to place through time locale, & at all times the chemistry between Gordon & Amal is quite pleasant to watch as they trip through the ordealistic travails of the Syrian refugee. Stagecraftwise, the music is excellen, all Turkish strings & twangs, while the set is smart enough – a soft-watching medley of warm squares of quasis-granite. I also found the explosive & light-flashing portrayal of a bombing scene stupendously atmospheric. The Sky is Safe is an hour long, Fringe-length of course, & the brevity is welcome in a play with just two actors. That doesn’t mean we only have two characters, however, while the brooding presence of  the interviewees is never afar away.  ‘My name is Marwa,’ we hear, ‘It means a smooth white rock. You need love to heal. My name is Jadwa. It means gift. We have men in power & the country is destroyed. My name is Raina… My name is Farida…’ etc, etc.

There are many strands to The Sky is Safe, whose well-researched material moulded into genuine entertainment by the slick Dogstar team. Theatre is about transporting the witness to another world, even when that world grates against our station in a fertile, wealthy island. There are real tragedies happening out there, real suffering, real & epic tragedies born of bureaucratic bullshit, all of which are conjoined by the spirit of hope; & although documentaries & news channels may be switched off or over, to get the same information from a trip to the theatre means one’s mind must become transplanted with the truth. In such a fashion The Sky is Safe is a welcome success, for the characters we are presented or more-than-real, the amplified essence of these desperate – for some – times.

Reviewer : Damo

Photos: Laurence Winram

It is still possible to catch The Sky is Safe on its tour of Scotland;

Sept 18-20 : Eden Court, Inverness
Sept 21 : Reay Village Hall
Sept 21 : PPP, Wick
Sept 23 : Durness Village Hall

Royal Lyceum
Edinburgh
September 7-23

Script:  Stagecraft:  Performance:

The topical transatlantic hot potato that is racial integration has just exploded like a White Supremacist nail-bomb onto the Lyceum stage. I’m always a little wary about picking open old social wounds in the name of entertainment, let sleeping rabid dogs lie kinda thing, but seeing as ignorance is in fact the bedrock of racism, encapsulating & regurgitating the essence of the tamer, slave-emancipating British variety through the educatory medium that is theatre is a prudent exercise. ‘We need to talk about England,’ the Lyceum’s artistic director, David Greig, told the Mumble, surfing the socialistic waves instigated by Brexit, for the England of 2017 is one in which the post-imperial diaspora has finally taken root. What Shadows explores what it means to be English, & in the play, the daughter of Caribbean immigrants, sable-skinned Rose Cruikshank, states quite proudly & progressively, ‘we all have multiple identities, but English is what we share.’ ‘But there are some of us more English than others,’ retorts a near-death Enoch Powell, who insisted on funneling his deep-set & quite inane old-school attitudes of race & Empire into the fermenting cauldron of modern Britain. It was 1968, & his ‘Rivers of Blood Speech’ – or the ‘Birmingham Speech’ as Powell called it himself rather whimsically – would plant ideas into the British psyche which would take decades to shake off. Not quite as incendiary as the 1861 Cornerstone Address by Confederate Vice President Alexander Stephens which ignited the American Civil War, but still a rather combustible collection of words which escalated into abhorrent social conflict that cup-of-tea-&-a-biscuit racism of English housewives. No longer would we hear, ‘that Sheila Donnelly’s shacked up with one of them coons, y’know!’ ‘Bloody nora, I wonder what colour the kid will be?’ Instead, ‘fuck off Pakis back to your own country,’ would become the bestial norm.

The stage before us is sparse but vivid; a wee copse of permanent Silver Birches transmorphing in eclectic variations of projected video-light.  The script we hear is intelligent, witty & informative; a fascinating triumph of integrity by Chris Hannon. I enjoyed his previous work for the Lyceum – in which he manage to shorten the Iliad & still make it resonate with Bronze Age beauty. With What Shadows we may observe Hannon’s growing sense of maturity, & also historicity, of which David Greig told The Mumble, ‘Chris Hannan uses his skill to shatter & examine some of the most urgent questions of the moment: Who are we? Where are we going? And who gets to decide?‘  The story is presented by a stellar cast, a cornucopian banquet of talent consisting of British-Asian stalwarts Waleed Akthar (Salmon Fishing in the Yemen) & Amneet Chana (what has he not been on?), Amelia Donkor, Nicholas Le Provost, Paula Wilcox  & Joanne Pearce. The richest picking on this silver platter is Ian McDiarmid, whose mountain-peaked experience was distilled into a rendition of Powell’s speech itself, with his genius steaming through every nuance of accent, emotion & snidey attack on the fledgling immigrant infrastructure of England. As an audience member born a decade after the speech, hearing McDiarmid in full flow offered a crystal clear memorial to that landmark occasion, allowing me to experience at quasi-first-hand that venomous piece of history which resonated bigotry & ignorance thoughout the land. No longer was England a place of churches, picnics & sunken lanes, but ghettos were developing in the inner cities out of which, according to Powell, legions of darkies would swarm to take over the island.

The speech came at the heart of the play – just before the interval. Before, & after, the action oscillated between the late 60s & 1992, telling Enoch’s personal story & the lingering after-effects of the speech – from Oxbridge to Wolverhampton via the barren shores of remote Scotland – while also sketching out a brief history of immigrant integration from its awkward early steps to the times when illiterate Pakistani villagers had given themselves a British education & got a decent job in a modern, accommodating & progressive society. The second half was a little drifty, lacking the dramatic tension that entailed the build-up to the speech… but the finale was excellent, a caustic conversazione between Rose Cruickshank & an elderly Enoch Powell, physically shaking with Parkinson’s Disease & spiritually shaking at the gall this young black woman had to question his inherent racist attitudes. As smart & witty as Virginia Wolfe at a literary soiree, she cut Powell to pieces during an existential debate which left me wondering what the next step of social integration is going to be. I guess, when someone asks us where we are from & who we are, we shall eventually reply only with a curt, ‘I am global.’

Reviewer : Damo