Theatre
PREVIEW CLASSIC MEDEA Citizens Theatre, Glasgow, Tue 9–Sat 13 Mar Barry Rutter, artistic director and performer for Northern Broadsides, is what you might call Medea savvy. In bringing this touring version of Euripedes greatest tragedy to Scotland, he has plainly thought carefully about both the locations in which the piece will play, and the way that a 2500-year-old tragedy might be deployed to contemporary effect.
is always contemporary.’
More immediately, Rutter has turned to one of the foremost poets on these islands, Tom Paulin, to produce this version. Aside from having a distinctly local sound, this piece promises a certain authenticity to the play’s ancient origins. ‘The language is very spare, as you’d expect from Tom. I encouraged him to go that way, it kind of complements his poetry,’ explains Rutter. ‘It’s not over flowery, because I don’t like to go that way anyway with all that Victorian hangover about language.
The story of Medea, a woman brought to a foreign ‘The short sharp word is much more percussive and
land, abandoned for a new woman by her husband and threatened with further exile, might have a certain contemporary relevance. Her decision to slaughter her own children as an act of revenge might also strike a grisly kind of chord. ‘It happened today with a woman from Birmingham,’ Rutter comments. ‘It’s not something that stops. We’ve seen the same stories re-enacted again and again in the media. The stuff of human conflict passionate, and it sounds more like ancient Greek. Theatrically, they spoke in masks, and you can’t speak too many vowels in masks, so it’s much more like how the original would have sounded, I think. Besides, all of Northern British sounds, from Yorkshire, right up to the North of Scotland has these short sharp vowels, so the pronunciation is more like Ancient Greek.’ (Steve Cramer)
PREVIEW BALLET ENGLISH NATIONAL BALLET: GISELLE & MEN Y MEN Theatre Royal, Glasgow, Wed 17–Sat 20 Mar
A strong male dancer lifting his female partner gracefully into the air is one of the defining images of classical ballet.
So it took some getting used to when the dancers at English National Ballet (ENB) had to take the opposite approach in Wayne Eagling’s new all- male piece Men Y Men. ‘We’re so used to partnering, but it’s a completely different technique to actually be partnered,’ explains dancer James Streeter. ‘A girl learns the technique of being partnered early on – making herself light and knowing to plié when we lift – and when you’re used to doing the lifting, and suddenly you’re being lifted yourself, it’s a very different feeling.’
Lifts are just one aspect of the
exciting new piece, which also features leaps, turns and all the other key aspects of male classical ballet. The short work is being performed as an opener to Giselle when ENB visits Glasgow for its first time in Scotland since 2006. Stepping from the testosterone-charged atmosphere of Eagling’s piece into the world of Giselle is a challenge but rewarding for the audience. ‘We try and do the change from Men Y Men to Giselle in three-and-a-half minutes,’ says Streeter. ‘Which can be hard because you go from being very intense and controlled to bright and airy and off to work in the village. But it’s great for the audience because they see this fluid piece for men and when the curtain goes back up, there’s this light, beautiful stage. It’s completely different.’ (Kelly Apter)
REVIEW REVIVAL THE BEAUTY QUEEN OF LEENANE Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh, until Sat 13 Mar ●●●●●
Martin McDonagh’s 1996 play is one of those unsettling works that leads its audience down one path, and then gleefully turns our expectations upside-down. The milieu of the play, being set in the dingy kitchen of a house in a west of Ireland rural backwater, and the dysfunctional relationship between monstrous matriarch Mag Folan and her daughter Maureen, recalls the social realist tragicomedy of sitcoms such as Steptoe and Son. Here mother and daughter’s earthy, repetitive sparring lifts the lid on the daughter’s dreams of escape, and her mother’s terror of being placed in a home.
The first act is driven by the possibility of love between Maureen and gentle, kindly Pato Dooley, at home from London for a brief visit, and Mag’s determination to wreck her daughter’s chances. We arrive at the end of the first act firmly rooting for Maureen and Pato – but then the piece takes an unexpected and much darker turn.
What’s remarkable about McDonagh’s play is the way it wrong-foots its audience, shifting our sympathies in the process. The playwright harnesses the west of Ireland dialect to great comic effect, but the four-strong cast brings an integrity to the roles that elevate them above the merely grotesque, Cara Kelly being particularly believable as the spinster daughter pushed to the edge of reason by her domestic circumstances. (Allan Radcliffe)
82 THE LIST 4–18 Mar 2010
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