Theatre review: Biding Time; Glasgow Arches

A MULTIMEDIA mash-up of live music, playful theatricality and broken dreams, Biding Time (Remix) is an absorbing collaboration between electro art-popsters A Band Called Quinn, Australian playwright Pippa Bailey and Grid Iron director Ben Harrison, a vital piece that’s alternately comical and sinister but musically compelling throughout.

A MULTIMEDIA mash-up of live music, playful theatricality and broken dreams, Biding Time (Remix) is an absorbing collaboration between electro art-popsters A Band Called Quinn, Australian playwright Pippa Bailey and Grid Iron director Ben Harrison, a vital piece that’s alternately comical and sinister but musically compelling throughout.

The production reworks Bailey’s 25-year-old text about an actress, Thyme, and her disillusionment with fame through the experiences of Quinn’s singer-songwriter Louise Quinn, whose Nineties outfit Hardbody had their own fleeting brush with the big time. The rarefied, insular world of stardom is suggested by the silent disco earphones the audience are given to listen with, anticipating Quinn’s growing detachment and alienation from loved ones as she chases success.

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She is drawn, Alice-like, into this artificial realm by a giant white rabbit, a silent, enigmatic figure (Martin McCormick) who serves as instigator of, fellow passenger in and commentator on the narrative. Meanwhile, Diane Torr pops up as an exploitative record company exec, while McCormick appears as a series of surreal, supportive and obstructive characters in films by Uisdean Murray, projected on opposing walls.

In an era of talent shows like X-Factor, scepticism about a manipulative music industry and the importance of style over substance are at an all-time high. Yet Quinn’s intermittently vulnerable, defiant and philosophically accepting central performance, with tracks like You Know The Right People and Snowing In Paris, has an emotional agony that outstrips mere technology and 
cynicism.

Rating: * * * *