My Festival: Gerry Mulgrew

Published on 19/08/2012 02:51

International: I’ve just been to see Meine Faire Dame. I don’t know if you’ve seen it but my mate Graham Valentine was in it, which is largely how I knew about it.

I was going to go see it in Basel but I’m glad I saw it here because it’s got English subtitles. Nobody knew quite what to make of it, but I found it quite melancholic – it’s quite slow in places with big longueurs, but I didn’t mind that, I enjoyed it. It’s a mad spoof of My Fair Lady and it’s very difficult to describe because it’s quite abstract in many ways – lots of beautiful music and singing. It’s about the despair of ordinary people in a materialistic society, something like that. I’m not a critic – I don’t have to concoct weasel phrases for a living...

Live art

Kin by Donna Rutherford (Playhouse on the Fringe until 27 August) is quite different – it’s one of the pieces in the Made in Scotland programme that my show, Tam O’ Shanter, is part of. It’s a bit more like performance art than theatre. Donna has interviewed a lot of middle aged people that she knows, for example Alison Peebles (right), and asked them to talk about their parents, who are in their eighties and nineties, and their feelings about them getting older, losing their memories and approaching death. I know Alison very well because we’ve been colleagues for about 30 years, and I knew her mother, who sadly died just a few months after she was filmed by Alison, so I was happy to see her again – you see the parents on screen with the voiceover of the person being interviewed. It’s really interesting – not cloying, but not unhappy.

Dance

I’m about to go and see Leaving Limbo Landing, Caroline Bowditch’s new show (St Andrew Square Garden, today and tomorrow). She used to be the disability dance officer with Scottish Dance Theatre. It’s an open air piece that involves able-bodied and disabled dancers. I know Caroline in passing, I met her in Dundee. My 21-year-old son has cerebral palsy and I’m going to take him along to see it. He goes to Drake Music a lot, and is about to go into a programme at Dance Base – he’s more involved in the arts than I am.

Theatre

I went to see Mr Carmen by AKHE theatre company (Assembly Roxy until 27 August) – which was fascinating, and brilliant in many ways. It’s like an interpretation of the Carmen story but you’d be forgiven for not discerning that in any way, it’s extraordinary and very difficult to describe. There’s a lot of object manipulation with puppets and devices – it’s incredibly precise but very strange and compelling.

• Gerry Mulgrew is currently performing in Communicado’s production of Tam O’ Shanter, at Assembly Hall until 26 August