Theatre reviews: Blinded by the Light | Mistero Buffo

Sylvia Dow’s Blinded by the Light is both a play about working people betrayed by those in power and a life-affirming tribute to their resilience, writes Joyce McMillan

Blinded by the Light, Barony Theatre, Bo’ness ★★★★

Mistero Buffo, Oran Mor, Glasgow ★★★★

The playwright Sylvia Dow is a Bo’ness woman through and through, profoundly devoted to the Forth shore community where she taught and still lives. She is also fascinated by its history, as a place so rich in shale and coal that it once found itself in the very forefront of Britain’s industrial revolution; and her new play Blinded By The Light - premiered in Bo’ness this week, with the Kinneil Brass Band playing up a welcome - is probably best understood as a passionate tribute to that community, and to the ways in which the current crisis in human history resonates through its past, present and future.

Blinded by the Light | Contributed

Presented by Dow’s own company Sylvian Productions, and directed with great skill and feeling by Philip Howard, Blinded By The Light works in two time-frames, telling the fact-based story of the 1982 occupation of the underground tunnels by a group of 12 Kinneil miners determined to prevent the closure of the mine, and also - in a bold shift of perspective - imagining the fate of two young people who have grown up in those same tunnels, in a future where the people of the area have had to take refuge underground from catastrophic climate change.

The connections between the two stories are sometimes obscure, sometimes ironic, sometimes powerful and poignant. In both cases, though, the play tells the story of ordinary people buffeted by the forces of history, often “kept in the dark” both literally and metaphorically, and yet somehow surviving, laughing, fighting, loving, telling stories, singing their songs. All of this is beautifully captured and held in focus by a fine company of five, featuring Holly Howden Gilchrist and Reece Montague as young Lily and Freddie, with Barrie Hunter, Rhys Anderson and a charismatic Andrew Rothney as the three 1980s miners, representing Kinneil’s “dirty dozen”.

And if Blinded by the Light is a play about working people betrayed and betrayed again by those in power, it is also a life-affirming tribute to their astonishing resilience; and one respectful enough not to flinch from the depth of the crisis we face now, as the machinations of the powerful threaten to rob us even of the beautiful, habitable planet that was once our birthright.

Lawrence Boothman in Mistero Buffo | Tommy Ga-Ken Wan

First written by Franca Rame and Dario Fo in the 1960s, the great radical monologue Mistero Buffo also offers a working-class view of a world shaped by the greedy, cruel, and over-mighty; but here, the target includes religious institutions that often pervert the message of Christianity in pursuit of wealth and power.

The speaker is a giullare or joker - a man who was once a husband, a father and a peasant farmer, but was robbed of everything by a wealthy baron, and became a travelling player. His stories tell of encounters with the sacred, loving and miraculous, as he journeys among the poor people of Italy; and in a strangely timely reflection on this moment of transition between two popes, Lawrence Boothman delivers an extraordinarily vivid and athletic high-camp performance as the joker, culminating in an almost frenzied encounter between a vain, self-aggrandising Pope Boniface, and Christ himself, carrying his cross to Calvary.

Somewhere in the heart of the show, though, there is a sequence about the massacre of innocents and the death of children that might have been written for this moment in history, the fierce strength of Fo and Rame’s dramatic writing ringing out through Joseph Farrell’s brilliant Scots translation, now revised for our time. And if Boothman’s performance is sometime so frantically physical that it distracts from the force of the text, there’s something about its desperate energy that also matches the moment - wild, despairing, and driven to the limits of rage and scorn, bitter laughter, and devastating grief.

Blinded By The Light is on tour until 24 May, visiting Kirkcaldy, Paisley, Cumbernauld, Edinburgh, St Andrews and Stirling. Mistero Buffo is at Oran Mor, Glasgow, until 10 May, and at the Gaiety Theatre, Ayr, 15-17 May.

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