REVIVAL MRS WARREN’S
PROFESSION
Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh, until Sat 10 Mar 0000
Easy truisms about the corruption that comes with money come as readin to the lips of those in authority today as they did in 1893. when Shaw's classic first appeared. only to banned for for 30 years. That money should be roundly condemned by those who have a surfeit of it shouldn‘t really surprise us though — Shaw himself often reminded us that this was the easiest strategy for them to hang on to it.
Here. it's less what‘s done for money that is condemned. than the narrowing down of options for women who require it. When young Vivie Warren (Emma Stansfield) learns from her mother (Paola Dionisotti) that her comfortable upbringing and education are the product of a living made through prostitution. she's realistic enough to understand. But her young beau Frank (Antony Eden), artist friend Praed (John Bett) and villainous Sir George Crofts (Dougal Lee). have different takes oin the story.
Tony Cownie's accomplished production sets itself in front of Neil Murray's design, a wall of quotations from the play itself which emphasises the language so key to the play's effect. Shaw‘s witty and compelling play of debate is just that. opening up. with its author‘s typical unsentimental logic. a multitude of possibilities. never giving any side of the argument an easy run. Thus it is that Stansfield's subtly nuanced and deftly played Vivie is not necessarily easy to like: instead we have a tougth pragmatic. often rather cold heroine. So too. Eden's boyfriend is both charming and dispiritingly feckless. the performer capturing the ambivalence nicely. (Steve Cramer)
SCOTTISH PREMIERE HUGHIE Arches, Glasgow, Fri 2-Sat 17 Mar
With his triple bill of Tennessee Williams shorts and Pinter's Moonlight to his credit over the last couple of years. Andy Arnold has more than demonstrated his credentials with marginal texts by acclaimed authors. The latest such exercise is this obscure one-act play from Eugene O'Neill. We might expect Long Day's Journey Into Night. M0urn/‘ng Becomes Electra or The Iceman Cornet/7 at our local reps. but Arnold. as ever. shows greater ambition.
Set in 1928. 14 years before its composition. it tells the story of Erie Smith. an aging gambler and wannabe man about town. who returns to his seedy New York hotel in the small hours of the morning to engage a disinterested desk clerk in conversation. Smith has been on a six-day bender after the death of the previous night clerk. and as his brief narrative unfolds. the sheer loneliness of a return to his room is deferred through extravagant. possibly apocryphal tales, of a life lived among big time gamblers and small time hoods. As the sounds of the streets echo from off, we might well be taken in by the attempt to make a link forged by the braggart and his laconic and unwilling companion.
Arnold's track record with this kind of work, here featuring Benny Young and Neil Docherty in the leads. makes this a strong recommendation. (Steve Cramer)
Review
NEW WORK
THE UNCONOUERED
North Edinburgh Arts Centre, Wed 7 Mar, then touring .00.
Sometimes, as one leaves a theatre, one can already sense the divide within an audience over the play just watched. Torben Betts’ new piece for Stellar Quines is such a case. The bone of contention? ln technique, this piece resembles nothing so much as an agit prop play of days gone by. Complete with grotesque papier maché props and an abstract giant doll’s house setting, it telegraphs its violent opposition to the status quo in a manner that might frighten the horses among an 803 generation taught to fear such overt aesthetic techniques. Younger practitioners and audiences are keen for such experiments, while older ones will recall them from the 705, but the middle aged might feel a little threatened.
A shame, really, for Betts’ angry forensics, tempered as they are by a rich and rhythmic poetic language have much to say to this Tesco and Ikea-drugged generation. The play posits not some vague unrest within the body politic, but a specifically socialist
Theatre
revolution in a Western Country not entirely unlike our own. As the Prime Minister and his cabinet are imprisoned, the great wave of popular uprising laps at the door of a dysfunctional middle class family, dividing the empty, spiritually impoverished parents from a daughter whose intellectualism leaves her a distant, voyeuristic cheerleader to the mighty events unfolding. A giant jet fighter, leading a violent American counter insurgency hangs like the judgement of some malevolent god over their home, and a soldier arrives to rape and impregnate the daughter.
Muriel Romanes’ production, in front of Keith Mclntyre’s suitably caricatured design, captures the savage indignation of the piece nicely. Like some Augustan satirist, Betts concentrates upon our capacity for consumption over analysis, filling the air with grotesque, animalistic sounds of mastication, digestion and appetite as the parents fail utterly to reflect upon the world they have created, to the point where helicopters and gunfire, equally grotesquely amplified, seem to follow with horrifying inevitability. This glowering vision of what the west is putting in the bank for itself posits no easy solutions, and though the middle stages could be trimmed a little, the whited-up four strong cast performs with admirable power and precision. (Steve Cramer)
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