Theatre review: Shattered Head

Published on Tuesday 2 March 2010 18:03

SHATTERED HEAD *** ORAN MOR, GLASGOW

THE lunchtime Play, Pie and Pint season at Oran Mor has staged more than 170 new plays since 2004; but still, I can't recall ever seeing one that looked as much like a tentative work-in-progress as Graham Eatough's Shattered Head, based on a concept by Maggie Rose.

The idea is to investigate the life and art of the great Edinburgh-born sculptor Eduardo Paolozzi by setting up a tension between the stasis of Paolozzi's final years – when he was confined to a wheelchair following a massive stroke – and the frenzied activity of the 1950s and 1960s, when he became the toast of the London art scene.

The play's central thesis – very slow to emerge – is that Paolozzi's single-minded commitment to his work emerged partly in reaction to the trauma of his teenage years during the Second World War, when his father and grandfather were among the hundreds of interned Italian Scots who lost their lives in the sinking of the Arandora Star. And the play certainly adds something to the current debate about the meaning of 20th-century modernism, delving into the painful and thrilling clash between human and mechanical forms that drives Paolozzi's best-known work.

The problem, though, is that although Shattered Head brings all these ideas together on stage – in a kind of surreal jazz-inflected dream-play, set in and around the "shattered head" of the ageing Paolozzi – it hasn't yet discovered the sequence that would carry them forward without painfully flat-footed passages of explanatory dialogue.

As the old Paolozzi, Michael Mackenzie gives the kind of superb performance that wins Oscars; Louise Ludgate is magnificent as his nurse, and all the other women who haunt his dreams. But though the ideas and cast are in place, the structure and dialogue need work; catch Shattered Head next week at the Traverse, and see whether you can help hammer it into shape.