Theatre review: Surge Festival

Published on Friday 23 July 2010 19:42

SURGE FESTIVAL *** VARIOUS VENUES, GLASGOW

IT'S worth remembering how completely the old magical arts of popular entertainment were swept from Scotland's streets 400 years ago, during our ultra-radical Protestant revolutions. The odd bout of acrobatics or clowning still survived, of course; and by the 19th century, Scotland was beginning to create its own distinctive tradition of variety and pantomime.

Yet still, there's a sense of something being reborn around the Conflux Project - aimed at developing Scotland's street arts, physical theatre and circus - that reached its climax in last week's Surge Festival in Glasgow. And although most of the shows I saw during Saturday's final celebration were created by visiting companies, there's a clear interest in developing home-grown talent.

So in George Square, as I climbed off the train, I found Hilary Westlake's group Used To Be Slime - half-a-dozen performers and a six-piece brass band - performing a polite but engaging piece of physical theatre about the weather, in the shade of a cunningly-designed set-cum-storage box that looked like plinth of an average town-square statue.

Down at the Broomielaw, the Dumfriesshire-based Oceanallover company staged The Tide Machine, featuring at least 16 performers and a four-piece strolling band, and set around a "tide-powered, kinetic performance platform" - that is, a small stage surrounded by brightly-painted machinery, like a giant toy.

The 40-minute show, inspired by the shapes and movements of exotic deep-sea creatures, seems to be about an encounter between three competing marine civilisations: one crab-like and grumpy; one white, scaly and aggressive; one pink, orange and beautiful, like slender coral-reef flowers.

The costumes and vocal sounds are astonishing; but the tide machine was a sad disappointment.

Then it was on to the Briggait building for a brief and touching pole performance from Moritz Linkman, as a Dietrich-like transsexual icon from pre-war Berlin; and back to the Arches for Red Bastard, a slightly terrifying 75-minute bouffon show by Eric Davis of New York, pictured above. The bouffon is that red-costumed, bulbous, devil-like figure who cares for nothing and no-one except his own pleasures.

Davis is a truly commanding and charismatic performer, using an ancient stage tradition to force the audience to think about the strange link between cruelty and freedom. It seems a good time to bring figures like the buffon into deeper contact with Scotland's tradition of stage comedy, if only to see where that new relationship leads.