Theatre reviews: Bottom's Dream | Thrice

Bottom’s Dream, Oran Mor, Glasgow ★★★★

Thrice, Tramway, Glasgow ★★★★

There’s no question – if recent studies are accurate – that class, and the exclusion of working class voices, is a growing problem in British theatre; so it’s perhaps not surprising that two of the four theatre shows I’ve seen, this past week, focus on stories of working class actors trying to survive in an industry where the odds are stacked against them.

The first was ThickSkin’s of Wigan’s powerful ghost story about exploitation down the ages, It Walks Around The House At Night, seen at The Studio and the Tron last week. And the second is Bottom’s Dream, the latest show by brilliant Glasgow bard Martin O’Connor, who has only recently completed a triumphant tour of his powerful 2025 monologue Through The Shortbread Tin.

When it comes to theatre and class, of course, it’s easy to feel that Shakespeare, and his continuing pervasive presence in established UK theatre, is part of the problem; but as O’Connor knows, and superbly demonstrates here, his matchless stage poetry can also fuel transformative change, and point towards solutions.

So here, O’Connor becomes a latter-day Glasgow Bottom, inspired by the character in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. In the play, Nick Bottom is a weaver, and one of the “rude mechanicals”; here, he retains the day job, but is otherwise a 21st century self-educated working class guy with acting ambitions, running the gauntlet of drama classes dominated by posh kids who say they can’t understand his accent.

With Martin O’Connor as with Shakespeare, though, the drama is all about the poetry, as he weaves fragments of Shakespeare’s text together with contemporary reflections on the obstacles he faces, often in rhythmic poetic forms that reach towards a lyrical kind of rap. By the end – when he gives a beautiful performance of the character Helena’s wonderful rebuke to those she believes are mocking her – this Nick Bottom is a man with a fledgling career, although one partly founded on his sheer novelty value as working-class Scot among actors.

And Shakespeare, or the character he created, seems like his true companion on that journey; the one who understands, in the very fibre of language, how it feels to come from the undervalued Bottom of society, and yet to dream of beauty and greatness, nonetheless.

Thrice

Also based on Shakespeare – and on the even more familiar material of Macbeth – is Thrice, the latest work from award-winning Glasgow-based physical theatre maker Al Seed. Best known for his brilliant wordless solo pieces – The Fooligan, Oog, Plinth – in this show Seed makes a complete departure from that style, to create and choreograph, with Judith Milligan and Lina Limosani, a beautiful and momentous one-hour show featuring nine female performers, in a meditation on the female presence of the witches in Macbeth.

On a bare stage – superbly lit by Antonio Santos Bello, and set only with a rough dry-stone wishing well – nine women of all ages and shapes, in timeless grey dresses, gather at the moment of Macbeth’s death, and – to the mainly recorded sound of their own voices chanting key moments from Shakespeare’s text, meshed with a tremendous musical soundscape by Guy Veale – begin to reflect on his story; the ambition, the crowning, the visions, the bloody reign of terror, the end.

They move, they gather, they form hugely powerful stage pictures; they loop and weaves across the stage like visual embodiment of the three fates spinning our fates – “thrice to thine, and thrice to mine, and thrice again to make up nine”. And always, there’s the magnificent poetry, raising the vision of how wise women have been persecuted as witches, through time; and of the sheer horror such tyrants have always visited on women and children, then as now. “Every morn, new widows howl”, the women cry – then, moving as one, they inch in magical light towards a future we cannot see, before fading into the dark.

Bottom’s Dream is at the Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh, 20-24 October. Thrice is at the Anatomy Rooms, Aberdeen, 19 October; Dundee Rep, 21 October; and the Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh, 23-24 October.

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