Theatre review: New Work, New Worlds

Published on Sunday 4 July 2010 21:00

NEW WORK, NEW WORLDS**** Arches Theatre, Glasgow

IT'S the final night of the New Works, New Worlds event at the Arches and it's good to report that after a subdued start, the annual festival of experimental work – curated by artistic director Suzi Simpson – is beginning to look much more like its feisty, fascinating self.

In the basement, artist Natalie Feather lets you throw a powdery puffball at a black wall, in an effort to make your own distinctive mark. If you pick up a headset from the box office, Richard DeDomenici walks you around the Arches space, while the images on your little hand-held computer and the text in your ear invite you to imagine yourself immersed in the politics of transport on the platforms of Glasgow Central Station, just 8m above.

And in the Playroom, young artist Philippa Mannion offers Unknown Unknowns, an interesting and sharp-witted work-in-progress about the bourgeois psychology of "doing something" about climate change, with the help of a bath gradually filled to overflowing by a young woman narrator, and two male co-performers.

Then there are two bigger shows full of thought and energy and beauty. In the Studio Theatre, Lucy Gaizely is in fine form with a new show called Stay, which seems at its heart to be about our society's deep resistance to the truth that we are not self-sufficient.

And finally, over in Arch 6, Kieron Maguire and his fellow musicians – on dulcimer, guitar, violin and percussion – simply ravish the audience with their Cabinet Of Living Cinema, which offers some wonderful mid-20th-century short films by Maya Deren, the Brothers Quay, and Andrei Khrjanovsky, which is made even more vivid by a 21st century musical accompaniment.

It's possibly not theatre. But it's living performance, lyrical, passionate and searching; impossible to forget.