Theatre reviews: Burke | The Grimstones: Hatched | Joyce Songs

Published on Wednesday 17 November 2010 10:14

BURKE THE STORE, EDINBURGH *** THE GRIMSTONES: HATCHED THE ARCHES, GLASGOW **** JOYCE SONGS ORAN MOR, GLASGOW ***

'WE HOLD these truths to be self-evident," wrote the founding fathers of the United States of America in 1776; and the first truth was that all men are created equal. What they implied, in this great statement of Enlightenment thinking, was that people should be recognised, at the deepest level, as having an equal value, and an equal right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness; and the story of Western civilisation, over the past two centuries, has largely been about the struggle to live out the meaning of that creed, as it applies to groups traditionally not accorded full human status.

Which is perhaps why the tale of William Burke and William Hare, the famous Edinburgh muderers of the 1820s, exercises such a steady grip on the public imagination. On one hand, they lived in the city which had spawned many of those Enlightenment ideas, a great centre of scientific progress and democratic intellect. Yet on the other hand, as desperately poor Irish migrants into a nation and a city where Catholics were still treated as an inferior breed, they found themselves on the wrong end of a street culture that clearly regarded some men and women as more equal than others; and had no hesitation in passing on those brutal attitudes to their 16 victims, people whom they had decided were less valuable as living human beings, than as fresh corpses delivered for a handsome sum to the back door of Dr Knox's anatomy school.

If John Landis's current film Burke and Hare frames this paradox as a bit of a comedy caper, though, Caroline Dunford's short play Burke takes a more serious view, exploring the forces that might have caused a complex man like Burke to rebel against what he knew to be right, and commit an atrocious series of murders.

Playing this week at The Store in Guthrie Street, formerly known as the GRV, in a quietly effective production by young Edinburgh company Siege Perilous, the play takes a slightly wordy and worthy approach to this story: as Burke languishes in prison awaiting execution, and Hare in a nearby cell demands release after turning king's evidence, both are visited by Captain Rose of the militia, a thinking man who wants to understand their relationship, and the source of their evil.

The play offers no tidy resolution.At the end, Burke is presented as a man driven by grief, and the death from hunger and disease of his seven young children, into a brief but passionate rebellion against God and the world; Hare as either a devil incarnate, or a practical man striking a bargain with a dying friend who has agreed to take the rap for both of them. Over an hour of tense dialogue, Caroline Dunford's script covers some fascinating ground, in exploring the nature of evil, and Stuart Nicoll's confident production features three impressive performances, from Andrew Hainey as Burke, Gregor Firth as Hare, and Mark Kydd as the a puzzled and complex Captain Rose.

In Glasgow, meanwhile, the Arches Theatre is hosting most of the events in DaDaFest 2010, a festival - first created in Liverpool, but now on its travels around the country - that celebrates the full humanity and explosive creativity of artists who are deaf or disabled. The festival runs until the end of next week, but it launched on Monday with a single, memorable performance of The Grimstones: Hatched, an exquisite puppet show with three magical miniature storybook sets by Australian artist Asphyxia, and her performing partner Paula Dowse.

Set in a mythical, Edwardian-looking past, The Grimstones: Hatched is a gothic family tale, with narrative in both voice and sign-language, about the grief-stricken widow Velvetta - who spends all her nights sprawled across the marble tomb of her adored dead husband - and her little daughter Martha, who knows that her mother is weeping for all the other babies she will never have, and wants, with the help of her old grandfather's book of spells, to try to fill the gap.

The problem is that Martha's amateur spells produce a baby, born from an egg, who is just a little bit more than perfectly normal. "So what if he has three legs?" intones Dowse, deadpan, for little Martha loves her new baby brother anyway, and it's remarkable to see the expressions on the faces of Asphyxia's beautiful small marionettes seem to soften and change, as the rest of the family gradually come to agree with her.

There's a similar - if slightly raunchier - Edwardian mood this week at Oran Mor, where the Dublin duo Sinead Murphy and Darina Gallagher boldly step into the breach to replace a play cancelled at the last minute with their delightful cabaret piece Joyce Songs. The show is a brief 45-minute entertainment that offers a rare insight into the contemporary popular music that haunted James Joyce's imagination while he was writing Ulysses, Finnegan's Wake, and A Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man.

Although Joyce was clearly more equal than some other artists, as a towering genius of the early 20th century, it's good to be reminded of how, for him, the popular culture of the streets and music halls - saucy, sentimental, often downright rude - merged with the Irish song tradition and the great music of Homer's poem to create one of the mighty literary artworks of the age.And good, too, to join in a rousing final chorus of Just A Song At Twilight, the tune that Molly Bloom is supposed to be rehearsing with one of her admirers, while her husband sets out on his epic journey around Dublin, and into new times.

• Burke and Joyce Songs both until 20 November. DaDaFest is at various venues around Glasgow until 25 November.