Theatre review: The Making Of Us, Tramway, Glasgow

THE big space of Tramway 1 has become a movie sound-stage for this latest joint project between artist Graham Fagen and theatre director Graham Eatough.

Around us, as we drift into the space, we discover a series of film sets – bar, office, hotel room, tree – waiting for action; once the weekend performances are over, these sets will become an installation, part of the current Glasgow International art festival.

The action begins at the bar, where a young man who might be one of us, standing in the queue, is spotted, and recruited to star in the film.

His name is Jonathan; and over the next 70 minutes, we see him – or the character he plays, or both – grasping the chance to win fame and success, betraying his past love, starting a new life with his lovely co-star; then suffering a very public come-uppance, and finally succumbing to despair.

The show dwells, like most of Eatough’s recent work, on the layers of performance and self-presentation that define post-modern lives; the endless artifice of film-making becomes a multi-layered metaphor for a world out of touch with authenticity.

If this obsessive deconstruction of the idea of performance can seem a shade repetitive, though, there’s something about the look of this show, its expansive scale and its deep sense of moral hazard, that haunts the imagination; and it features three immaculate performance from Ali Craig, Lucianne McEvoy and Keith Fleming, as the actors whose professionalism about the act of pretence represents some kind of still point, in a shape-shifting world.

Rating: ****