Things to make you go 'hmmm'

Published on Friday 24 January 2003 00:00

WHAT do actors Tam Dean Burn, Anne Marie Timoney and Cora Bissett have in common with a nuclear physicist called Dr Ralf Kaiser and Paddy Joe Hill, one of the Birmingham Six? They will all be appearing at the Tron in Glasgow over the next couple of months in a show called Kabaret Uh-Huh.

Confused? You will be after a conversation with Kabaret Uh-Huh organiser Ken Davidson. As director of experimental theatre company Ten28 until 2001, he oversaw nine productions - each based on a chapter of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake - which were about as far from conventional theatre as possible. On Midsummer’s Night in 1995, Dean Burn performed the sixth show on top of a hill in Castlemilk with two small boys and a stage-shy donkey called Amanda; in 2001, in the last piece, a horse rolled around in a giant sandpit to a soundtrack of aeroplanes and breaking glass.

Davidson’s mind doesn’t exactly run along predictable lines, in other words. Ask him a question - any question - and you’ll get an answer you weren’t expecting. Why is Kabaret Uh-Huh so-called? "Because I’d been working with the noises ‘hmmm’, ‘aah’ and ‘oh’ and ‘uh-huh’ was a logical progression."

Who are these Roma Latvian Keyboard Vocal Orchestra people who are going to be playing on Sunday night? "They’re invisible people who don’t officially exist."

It’s not always easy to pin Davidson down to exact details, but most of the following information is probably accurate. Between now and March there will be four Kabaret Uh-Huh shows at the Tron. If a funding application to the Scottish Arts Council is successful, there will be more.

At tomorrow’s Burns’ Night gig, Dean Burn, Bissett and Nicholas Bloomfield will perform songs by Burns. There will be poetry from the poet Marnie and music from Nectarine Number 9, the thinking man’s rock’n’roll band. On Sunday, Dean Burn and Timoney will perform a short piece called C20 Bye-Bye which, according to Davidson, "reflects 100 years of history and tries to draw some positive notes from that". Looking further ahead, there will be a performance of experimental music by the Japanese composer Toru Takmitsu on 16 February and songs from Hill (the Birmingham Six guy) on 16 March. And what about Kaiser, the nuclear physicist? "He’s from the University of Glasgow," says Davidson. "Originally from Hamburg. Lovely man. He’ll be giving a no-maths explanation of the nature of reality on Sunday - a Powerpoint demonstration with loads of images." And how did you run into him? "We had a conversation over a cup of coffee. He had some interesting viewpoints on superstring theory and reality structures." Oh, right.

Kabaret Uh-Huh, Tron, Glasgow, tomorrow, 26 January, 16 February and 16 March, tel: [phone].