Theatre review: Empty/Mr Write

Published on Monday 15 March 2010 18:08

EMPTY **** MR WRITE *** TRON THEATRE, GLASGOW

THE NTS has been at it again, this past week, smashing preconceptions about the idea of a National Theatre by taking over the Tron and making three fairly anarchic theatre pieces with and for a young an audience aged under 21. Empty and Mr Write are the two shorter shows of the three; and in Cathy Forde, the fortysomething author of Empty, the NTS seems to have brought into theatre a writer with some of that hard-edged courage that makes really exciting drama possible.

It's not that Empty – her five-handed drama for a bunch of young people staging the teenage party from hell in a friend's house while his parents are away – is entirely easy to watch. Visibly influenced by the recent global success of the artfully chaotic Belgian teen show Once And For All, Vicky Featherstone's production allows for plenty of shapeless mumbling and wandering, as the kids gradually reduce the house to rubble and blunder into frightening levels of emotional damage. But if the style sometimes becomes wearing over 80 minutes, there's a fantastic free-wheeling theatrical energy here, with a real sense of characters on the kind of journey that, however messy, changes lives; along with five performances to cherish.

In Mr Write, meanwhile, experimental performance man Rob Drummond sets up a loose narrative framework, but then invites a volunteer from the audience to fill out the evening's new play with genuine details from his or her own life. It's easygoing stuff, not nearly as intense as the instant-performance work created by specialists like Tim Crouch. But it raises timely questions, about the borderlands between fictional drama and "reality", and the stories we make of our own lives; and it's also a lovely, sympathetic and enjoyable human experience, which is set to tour, over the next three weeks, from Glasgow to Kilmarnock, Hawick, Paisley, Edinburgh, Falkirk, Nairn, Stromness and Kirkwall.