Theatre review: Sleeping Beauty Insomnia | Mikey and Addie | Fight Night

While the One Day in Spring season offers another tale of youth betrayed, the Imaginate children’s festival concludes with a hopeful flourish.

Sleeping Beauty Insomnia

Oran Mor, Glasgow

****

Mikey and Addie

Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh

***

Fight Night

Tron Theatre, Glasgow

****

A GENERATION betrayed. It’s a theme that increasingly echoes across the planet, from the streets of Cairo to the campuses of UK universities; and while some young people are simply enraged by mass youth employment and poverty, others, brought up in material comfort, still feel other kinds of loss – of autonomy, authenticity, and the chance to make their own way in a world with some kind of future.

The idea of the betrayal of the young by their elders has certainly been a strong feature of the current One Day In Spring season of shows from the Arab world, playing in the Play Pie and Pint lunchtime season at Oran Mor and the Traverse. It was there in the thrilling small-scale Moroccan epic Hadda And Hassan, set to reappear at the Traverse in June, and in Abdullah Alkafri’s poignant Syrian domestic drama Damascus Aleppo; and it surfaces again in Abdelrahim Alawji’s memorable dark comedy Sleeping Beauty Insomnia, set in the basement auditorium of a theatre in Beirut during the last Israeli attack on alleged terrorist strongholds in South Lebanon.

Following a direct hit on the theatre, two men find themselves trapped on the stage, in front of a dead audience who start to whiff a bit as time wears on. The Older Man is a Christian, a bit of a recluse, a former soldier in Lebanon’s ugly civil war; the Young Man is a former theatre student, now unemployed, and a Muslim, although not a very devout one.

The show’s theme, of course, is the underlying humanity of these two characters, and the fact that they have to get along, no matter how much they dislike one another. Storytelling forms one bond between them; and when an apparently dead girl falls through the ceiling, still and beautiful, the tale of Sleeping Beauty seems to be coming true, for at least one of them.

A little longer than the average Oran Mor play, at just over an hour, Sleeping Beauty Insomnia could perhaps use a tighter, briefer ending. Yet it unleashes a pair of powerful, witty and thoughtful performances from Stewart Porter and David Walshe, as the old and young man respectively; and as an example of brave and extravagant comic grace under pressure, it’s an outstanding achievement.

The Imaginate children’s festival in Edinburgh finished with a flourish last weekend, with a ten-show programme that included a promising new work from Scottish theatre-makers Andy Manley and Rob Evans, co-produced by the MacRobert in Stirling.

Mikey And Addie is a 50-minute play about two children – or young teenagers – who find themselves slightly adrift in a world without certainties. Addie, played with immense charm by Sally Reid, is a bit of a control freak, proud of her role as the new playground monitor. Mikey, played by Michael Dylan, is a boy in search of a lost dad, trying to disentangle the truth about his father’s life from the comforting childhood stories told by his mother.

As a show, Mikey And Addie has two slight problems; in that its story, when it finally gets to it, is a fairly familiar one of the quest for the lost father, and its imagery – which has to do with space, exploration, and stardust – only vaguely connects with the story, and often distracts from it, despite a pretty, sparkly set by Shona Reppe, like a museum of lost space debris. Yet in the end this is a moving tale, well told by two fine actors; and for many children in the audience its slow disentangling of adult lies and truths – and its understanding that lies can sometimes be told out of love – will come all too close to the mark.

Straight from the streets of Finglas, in North Dublin, Gavin Kostick’s one-hour monologue Fight Night – playing at the Tron until tonight – tells what is, for Scottish audiences, an even more familiar story, of a working-class kid robbed of real economic opportunity, for whom boxing represents one way out of poverty, anonymity and self-contempt. Beautifully played by Michael Sheehan, in a hugely athletic and emotionally flawless performance, Dan Coyle represents the third generation in his macho working-class family to bear that name, and to feel the pressure to perform; but after failing to step up for a vital fight six years ago, 28-year-old Dan has lost touch with his parents, and has focused on becoming a full-time Dad to his little son Jordan.

One day, though, little Jordan calls him “Da”, triggering an avalanche of emotion and memory, and motivating Dan to begin to get his fitness back. The play catches him – rippling with muscles, skipping, running, doing press-ups – at the moment when he is about to enter the ring again; but it suggests that, through the love of a good woman, and of his son, Dan may have reached a point where he really can do this for himself, and not only as part of some long power struggle with his father, and his much more talented brother.

In outline, the story is sentimental enough; but in detail, Kostick has a huge amount to say about the dynamics of masculinity in a working-class community where work is scarce, and about the changing set of values by which men now in their twenties have to judge themselves. The show also has a kind of effortless theatricality, as Dan tells his story, and demonstrates his training regime; not complex, not elaborate, not expensive to present, but completely gripping from start to finish.

• Sleeping Beauty Insomnia is at Oran Mor, Glasgow, until Saturday, and at the Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh, 22-26 May. Mikey and Addie will tour later this year. Fight Night is at the Tron Theatre, Glasgow, final performance tonight.