Theatre review: One Million Tiny Plays About Britain

Published on Friday 21 May 2010 20:45

One Million Tiny Plays About Britain**** Citizens' Theatre Glasgow

BASED on Craig Taylor's columns in the Guardian, One Million Tiny Plays About Britain is a whistle-stop journey across the UK, as we eavesdrop on real conversations and incidents, from park rangers scooping up litter in Glasgow to animal rights activists trying to maintain their dignity in Manchester. So universal and understood are these little moments that locations and accents could easily be interchanged without any lessening of impact.

If the sum of these parts is telling us anything about a wildly diverse modern Britain, it's that we are all living with a constant struggle to have our voices heard.

Clashes of culture, generation gaps and religious divides are already tough enough to bridge but when you throw in the rampant technology which invades all our lives, it seems everyone is ultimately banging their heads against a wall.

So we have the "old-school" marketing man being fired because he doesn't understand e-mail or the woman who tries to capture photographic evidence of a motor crash on her mobile but accidentally sends a text instead.

This is a witty piece, beautifully directed by Ros Philips who utilises every inch within the studio space by allowing her uniformly excellent cast (Pauline Turner, Sushil Chudasama, Mark McDonnell) to occasionally take their places among us. But the audience never feels intruded upon, simply left to contemplate the meltdown and paranoia inflicted by contemporary living.