Theatre Review: Town Bloody Hall/The Library

Published on Wednesday 15 April 2009 19:41

FOR all her youth, Arches award-winner Nic Green has that same ability both to engage with history, and set about transcending and transforming it.

Her award-winning show, Town Bloody Hall, is the middle section of a feminist trilogy about where women are today, 39 years on from The Female Eunuch. Inspired by a film of a famous debate which took place at New York Town Hall in April 1971 – in which a panel of four feminists, led by Germaine Greer and Jill Johnston, led a kind of conceptual revolution against the male chair of the event, Norman Mailer – Green's piece uses improvisation, political reflection, reminiscence, gesture, music and dance, all devised and delivered by a superb young company of five, to create a complex contemporary response to the event. There's a shade too much repetitive movement for my taste. But at its best, this passionate ensemble response to one of the great revolutionary moments of the past century is shudderingly powerful; and full of an aching sense of the freedoms still unwon, and of untold possibilities of joy and fulfilment still just beyond our grasp.

The second Arches award-winning show, Sacha Kyle's The Library, seems lightweight by comparison. Set in a library where various lost souls dream, study, suffer and indulge in erotic fantasies, the show tours the horizon of a familiar twentysomething inner landscape, marked out not in politics or geography but in reassuring cultural landmarks, from old Brando movies to Jim'll Fix It. Some interesting themes glimmer through the detail, from the joyless tyranny of modern higher education, to the way education and book-learning divide families and become instruments of class. But to say Kyle fails to bring the themes together in a satisfying whole is to put things politely. And the final effect is often like a twentysomething version of Radio 4 comedy at its most irritating; self-absorbed, apolitical, culturally narrow and full of shallow comic gestures that lack real humour or wisdom.

&149 Town Bloody Hall and The Library are at the Arches, Glasgow, until 18 April, and at the Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh, from 22-25 April.