Theatre review: Arches Live! 2013, Glasgow

IT OFFERS more than 21 shows, installations and mind-blowing experiences and it feels like a trade fair of all that’s brightest in Glasgow’s booming young creative scene.

Arches Live! Festival - Arrow in the Eye. Picture: submitted

Arches Live! 2013 - Arches Theatre, Glasgow

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It’s Arches Live! 2013; and this year – to judge by the first evening’s events – seems like a festival with a split personality, on one hand strongly political, on the other almost militantly personal and inward-looking.

Opera Breve’s 15-minute opera One Day This Will Be Long Ago dwells passionately on a moment of shared bliss between a young man and woman, briefly glimpsed, and then lost; while a string quartet, with added keyboards, delivers Alexander Horowitz’s music from behind a shadowy screen.

Thomas Hobbins’s Land’s End is an impressively poised account of a bike ride from Lands’ End to John O’Groats, shot through with a Radio-4-comedy-style combination of wry self-absorption, obsession with the cultural minutiae that shaped a generation, and an oddly facile cynicism about human nature.

Much more rousing, by contrast, are Deb Jones and the wonderful Alison Peebles in Cuff, a brief work-in-progress show about direct political action, from the protests of the suffragettes, to the moment when Sue Lawley, trying to read a 1980s news bulletin, was interrupted by angry lesbians invading the BBC studio.

Then there’s Amy Conway’s I-Happy-I-Good, which takes the radical step of blindfolding and deafening each audience member, and leading us one by one into the world of deaf-blind people and those who care for them. It’s fascinating and terrifying, an experience of intense vulnerability; but if good theatre is about changing our consciousness, then I-Happy-I-Good certainly achieves that, precisely and unforgettably.