Theatre review: Demons; Glasgow Oran Mor

WITH 13 writers involved, this political cabaret at Oran Mor looks a bit like a show designed by a committee.

It was put together by the team who created the Jean-Jacques Rousseau Show earlier this year, as the 250th play in David MacLennan’s remarkable Play, Pie and Pint series; this time around, though, the show is less well focused on a single theme.

It begins with a brilliant song about how the forces of reaction stay in power by inviting us to blame one another, rather than them. With the help of a stuffed scapegoat, a pitchfork, and a little red pair of horns, the five performers – led by Wildcat veterans David Anderson and George Drennan, with Kirstin McLean, Cat Grozier and Brian James – demonstrate how we are invited to demonise first women, then strangers and the poor – the “peely-wally gie’s-a-swally” underclass. In no time, though, the show veers off into a different and less sure-footed strand, in which McLean and James, as Marx and Engels, put on Groucho faces, and offer up sketchy lectures on Marxism distractingly peppered with Marx Brothers jokes.

Between these interludes, though, there are a few more excellent songs, including one on the notorious disability assessment regime, and a fierce satire on British attitudes to the monarchy in which McLean, as the Queen, yells out Monarchy In The UK, a lethally convincing top-down version of the Sex Pistols’ greatest hit. And at the end, dammit, David Anderson makes us cry, by calling up the spirit of John McGrath, and leading a new generation of Scottish theatre-makers in his great anti-Tory anthem, Get Them Out. With all its flaws, Demons comes as sharp reminder of how much we need this kind of angry, committed theatre; and how much we miss its sharp wit and acute political awareness, when it’s not around.

Rating: * * *