Theatre review: Arches Live; Glasgow Arches

By JOYCE McMILLAN
Published on 27/09/2012 03:18

IF THE shows in this year’s Arches Live! festival are any guide, both the personal and the political loom large in the work of the current generation of emerging artists; it’s just that sometimes, there are boundary issues about the relationship between the two.

Ian Nulty’s Robinson Family Undercover Secret Agents (HHH) starts in chilling political style, with a screen display of some of the sickening anti-Obama propaganda produced by the American far right. It sets the scene for some powerful sequences in which Nulty – as his right-wing alter ego Robert Robinson – indulges in real-time, real-life Facebook chat with America’s huge army of right-wing Christians.

Nulty’s problem, though, is that he can’t resist combining this hair-raising political exposé with some showy and awkward provocations about his life as a gay man in Britain. And the sense of confusion created by this shifting focus makes Catriona Ruth Paterson’s much shorter Miss Kitty Show (HHH) – a spectacularly-styled work-in-progress collision between the ideal-housewife aesthetic of the 1950s, and the brutal demands for perfection still inflicted on young women today – look like a more coherent account of the interface between the personal and the political, despite an embryonic script.

As for Mona Kastell’s L’Eveil (HHH), it’s billed as a “costume-led” show, and its solo performer Mazz Marsden does indeed wear a remarkable, chrysalis-like costume, as she dances her way through something like the emergence of a dragon-fly. The content, though, doesn’t amount to much more than a familiar series of movement-theatre clichés about birth, hatching, the life-cycle; attractive to look at, but not original enough to linger long in the mind.

Rating: * * *