Theatre reviews: A Wee Home From Home | Letters Of A Love Betrayed | Gabriel

Published on Wednesday 18 November 2009 18:08

LETTERS OF A LOVE BETRAYED *** TRAVERSE THEATRE, EDINBURGH A WEE HOME FROM HOME **** CARNEGIE HALL, DUNFERMLINE GABRIEL *** ORAN MOR, GLASGOW

THE Traverse is a theatre where they put on new plays, right? Well, yes; except that, as we move into the 21st century, audiences are beginning to demand theatre which clearly offers dimensions of experience that television and film can't match. This autumn, the Traverse has already offered a powerful new play, in Ursula Rani Sarma's The Dark Things. But the new Traverse Autumn Festival, running this week and next, is all about exploring the borderlands between theatre and other live arts, including music, dance, and visual installations from England, Scotland and Wales, all presented in bite-sized runs, for one night only.

The festival opened with a single performance of a new chamber opera by Music Theatre Wales, based on a short story by Isabel Allende. For most of its length, Eleanor Alberga's Letters Of A Love Betrayed is a moody, good-looking but predictable piece of modern opera, with a familiar Lorca-esque feel.

After the death of her parents, a girl called Analia is raised in a convent, where she lives mainly in her fierce imagination. When she reaches her teens, her scheming uncle – keen to keep hold of her land – bullies his son into wooing her with letters and then marrying her. The marriage fails miserably, and there is violence and blood; so far, so conventional, and, despite a passionate central performance from Mary Plazas as Analia, the story takes a long two hours and more to reach this crisis. The final 15 minutes – in which, as we might expect from Allende, Analia breaks out of this cycle of patriarchal gloom and destruction to shape her own life – is much stronger and more interesting, both dramatically and musically.

But it arrives too late and too abruptly to make as much sense as it should; and Mike McCarthy's production, backed by a superb, small, 14-piece orchestra, seems a puzzlingly old-fashioned and clunky affair, full of blackout scene-changes, in which stagehands walk about shifting small props, as if it were still the 1950s.

There's something slightly chewier and more interesting about Pan B Theatre's revival of their acclaimed 1988 show, A Wee Home From Home, already on tour around Scotland and set to visit the Traverse Autumn Festival next week.

Born in the year of the Glasgow Garden Festival, the show was created at a time when Glasgow was reinventing itself – or trying to – with an urgency and fervour that produced some terrific music, theatre and literature, and it's interesting that the current debate around this year's Homecoming seems to have prompted a revisiting of the "Maw Broon" issues around Scottish stereotypes and kitsch that were under examination then.

A Wee From Home is a vivid 65-minute piece – part dance-theatre, part song-cycle – in which dancer-choreographer Frank McConnell and singer-songwriter Michael Marra explore the thoughts of a man returning to his family's tenement home in Glasgow after a long absence. As he looks back over his life, he reflects on the joys of a Scottish education, on religion, sectarianism, football, shipbuilding, the River Clyde, the temptations of drink, and the joys and horrors of White Heather Club country-dance culture

It's a panoramic, dystopian vision of the key elements and clichs of Glasgow's image, and if both the content and the dance style in Gerry Mulgrew's production now seem a shade old-fashioned, the show still presents an intensely rich and colourful vision of the city, well captured in Karen Tennent's tenement-and-tartan set. Michael Marra's songs – delivered in his own inimitable, gravelly style, and including the iconic Mother Glasgow – stand the test of time startlingly well. It's worth noting that the show was disturbing enough, on a wet night in Dunfermline, to bring one ex-Glaswegian member of the audience to her feet in protest. She rapped on the stage, and accused Marra and McConnell of "making a mockery" of her beloved home city; as if there's still so much pain stored there, in Glasgow's traumatic history, that even a little post-modern deconstruction can seem too much to bear.

There's plenty of desperate deconstruction going on, too, in this week's Play, Pie and Pint lunchtime show at Oran Mor. In her 35-minute piece Gabriel, up-and-coming Scottish writer Catherine Grosvenor mounts a total assault on all our favourite clichs about childbirth and new motherhood. In her hospital room, Julie is watching ER and completely ignoring her newborn son, played by Michael Gray as a grown man in a soft baby shawl; she believes he is the devil. She pelts him with a used sanitary towel, searches out her stilettos and limps off, leaving him to the much more tender mercies of caring male nurse John.

When she returns a few hours later, though, things have become many times more surreal; the baby has announced his intention of becoming a nurse, conversed with poor John about it and explored every department of the hospital in a lightning process of self-education. His mother mistakes him for the doctor; he cares for her, in a kind of resolution. Is this a metaphor for the traumatic, terrifying, utterly unpredictable but ultimately healing experience of parenthood? Well, possibly. It's certainly an intermittently brilliant piece of writing, which makes space for a hair-raisingly fine central performance from Lesley Hart as Julie. It reaches such heights of craziness, though, that it half-undermines its own dramatic impact; like an image of post-natal madness made flesh, and not quite processed yet.

&#149 A Wee Home From Home is at Perth Theatre on Saturday, at the Traverse, Edinburgh, next Wednesday and on tour until 30 January. Letters Of A Love Betrayed is now finished. Gabriel is at Oran Mor, Glasgow, until Saturday.