Theatre review: Third Person: Ronnie and Clyde Redux

Published on Friday 12 November 2010 15:56

THE ARCHES, GLASGOW ***

THEY'RE based in Lancaster and New York; their current tour takes them to Scarborough, Crewe and Exeter as well as Glasgow; but wherever they're finding their inspiration, Proto-Type Theatre make an interesting job of this 60-minute reflection on the story of Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow, the archetypal young outlaw anti-heroes of Depression America.

Written by Peter S Petralia, and devised and performed by Gillian Lees and Andrew Westerside, the show follows the current performance orthodoxy of placing the storytellers in the foreground, so that we learn almost as much about Lees and Westerside – who are not lovers, but do work together, even when Lees has a lot of family members in the audience, etc etc – as we do about Bonnie and Clyde.

On the whole, though, they make a decent case for the power and integrity of this technique, only occasionally overstepping its limits as they gradually feel their way – from a 21st-century point of view – through the strange career of a doomed young couple who adored one another, and who seem to have fallen into a life of violent crime partly out of a strange kind of innocence.

They are helped, almost every inch of the way, by the power and poetry of Petralia's writing, which is clear, spare and strong, and has plenty to say about the madness of love, and about the fragility of conventional ideas of law and morality, faced by a stronger force, in a brutal world.