Theatre
PREVIEW MUSICAL RASPBERRY Tron Theatre, Glasgow, until Sat 3 Apr; Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh, Thu 8–Sat 10 Apr; Dundee Rep, Tue 13 & Wed 14 Apr
The life of singer-songwriter Ian Dury is as fascinating as the uncompromising songs he recorded with influential new wave band, the Blockheads. To date Dury’s story has inspired a musical (Hit Me!) and a biopic (Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll), and now award- winning playwright and artistic director of Fittings Multimedia Arts Garry Robson is about to take a musical inspired by Dury on the road in association with Scottish inclusive music theatre company Sounds of Progress. Based on stories and characters from Dury’s songs,
Raspberry focuses on Rita, a blacksmith’s daughter, born with physical disabilities, whose father attempts to ‘cure’ her. The piece takes its title from Dury’s own nickname for himself – Dury was left with physical disabilities after contracting polio as a child (‘raspberry ripple’ is the Cockney rhyming slang for ‘cripple’).
As New York-based actress and director Christine Bruno, who plays Rita, explains, the piece combines music from amazing bands such as The Superheroes
and Blind Gurl and the Crips with performance to create an entertaining night of theatre with an important political message.
‘It’s based on the life and music of Ian Dury but it has a story that everyone can relate to, whether they’re disabled or not, about a young person trying to break out of the mould,’ she says. ‘Everyone assumes that a disabled person wants to be “cured”, but this piece is about getting people to realise the universality of disability and embracing those differences.’
Bruno, who was a fan of Dury’s work before receiving
the script for Raspberry, auditioned for the play over the internet, including recording a couple of monologues and a song and taking part in meetings over Skype. (‘It was all very 21st century,’ she laughs.) She’s thrilled to be given the opportunity to take part in such an exciting showcase for disabled artists. ‘I’ve worked a lot in the UK and there’s much more of
an embracing of disabled artists in this country – I’m not sure a production of this size would even exist in the US. I think the UK is ahead of the US in terms of its understanding of disability and particularly disabled arts. There are almost no inclusive companies in the States.’ (Allan Radcliffe)
N E L L U C Y C U L
PREVIEW REVIVAL I WAS A BEAUTIFUL DAY Tron Theatre, Glasgow, Wed 14–Sat 17 Apr
Does where we are make us who we are? Where is home and what does it mean to be away from it? Can the essence of a place be evoked through the languages of words or maps?
These are the concerns at the heart
of I Was a Beautiful Day, the play commissioned by the Traverse to launch An Lanntair Arts Centre in Stornoway in 2005, now showing for the first time in Glasgow in a revised and considerably trimmed-down version from Alabaster Productions. The three-hander concerns a shell- shocked war veteran, Dan, and his memories of home – the Outer Hebridean Isle of Lewis – his erratic fellow-patient Lube, and cartographer Anne’s attempts to record the ancient place names that only he knows. Director Beckie Mills is convinced of
the ‘robust’, evocative power of Hebridean writer Iain Finlay Macleod’s revised text: ‘The danger, if you’re talking about landscape in a play, is that it can seem quite twee or wistful, but this really does transport the audience in some way, whether it’s through memory or imagination.’
The play deals with the challenges of positioning oneself within the various schemata of relationships, places and languages, and as such, maps, with their rich, visual language, seem to Mills to be the perfect symbol for how we do so: ‘It’s about how we record life, how we contain life and everything within it.’ (Laura Ennor)
PREVIEW DANCE SIX SHORT PIANO PIECES CCA, Glasgow, Sat 10 Apr
Arnold Schoenberg wrote his sparse, tiny Sechs kleine Klavierstücke (Six short Piano Pieces) in 1911, at a time of great personal and artistic upheaval. It’s no coincidence that Ian Spink has chosen this particular work for his first choreographic project with Dance House, Glasgow since leaving his long- term job as artistic director of Aberdeen’s Citymoves studio. ‘At Citymoves, my job was to do with enabling other people to be more creative. Moving to Glasgow is about shifting my focus back to my own creativity again, and this project is exciting because it’s the first fruit of that decision.’
Spink evidently feels a connection with Schoenberg. The finished production will evolve from a
week’s choreographic residency with nine hand-picked dancers, during which time the dancers will research Schoenberg’s life, and the wider political and artistic situations in Europe at the time. ‘Actors always research their work first: it’s important to their process of building characters. I’ve
begun working that way with dancers as well – it allows them a sense of ownership over the ideas. In my process it’s important that people can pursue or grab onto a line of research they feel comfortable with.’
Essentially, then, the end product should be something like choreography as biography? ‘I think so, yes. If I’m looking into what was going on in his life around about that period, his own
internal creative flow and his family situation, splitting up with his wife – I think he probably had a sense of disillusionment – that feeds the landscape of the choreography. With the dancers, in the workshop, we have to discover how to communicate those sensations through movement.’ (Kirstin Innes)
84 THE LIST 1–15 Apr 2010