Theatre reviews: Head. Heart. Hand. | (We Indulge In) A Bit of Roll Play
Stef Smith’s drama inspired by the history of Queen Margaret University shows how education is a radical project, writes Joyce McMillan
Head. Heart. Hand., Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh ****
(We Indulge In) A Bit Of Roll Play, Tramway, Glasgow ****
On the programme for Stef Smith’s new play – staged at the Traverse at the weekend as part of the 150th anniversary celebrations of Queen Margaret University, there is a picture of a march of 1970s students, on a demonstration against cuts. Their banners say “We Are Fighting For Your Children’s Education”; and it’s a picture that perfectly captures the spirit of Head. Heart. Hand., a play as much about struggle and striving as celebration.
It’s never easy for any writer to create a celebratory piece without lapsing into cliche; even more difficult when the piece has to be a short play tailored for performance by a final-year theatre group of 12 students, each with a speaking role.
Stef Smith, though – a QMU theatre graduate herself, and now one of the UK’s most successful millennial playwrights – has risen impressively to the challenge, in a play which echoes in its title QMU’s founding commitment to intellectual, practical and emotional education, and often whisks us through the years in fast-moving choreographed choral sequences that combine movement and music with powerful poetic language.
The play is built, though, around a series of slower-moving set-piece conversations that identify moments of real conflict or crisis in the university’s history, from the debate around its original opening in 1875 – as a free school of domestic science for the women of Edinburgh – through to the trauma of the Covid pandemic, and today’s continuing debates about whether universities as we currently know them can even survive the financial stresses and disruptions of the 21st century.
What Smith has created, in other words, is an exceptionally clear-eyed account of how education, and particularly education designed for women, is at heart a radical project, which raises uncomfortable questions, encourages active and questioning citizenship, and sometimes comes into serious conflict with those in power.
The young QMU cast performed the show with passion and skill, coping admirably with the high demands of the Traverse 1 space; and Stef Smith, the company, and a fine creative team led by director Bruce Strachan, have created a show that should be more widely seen and debated across the world of Scottish education, during this anniversary year.
Meanwhile, Glasgow-based Birds of Paradise – Scotland’s leading company for, by and with artists with disabilities – have created a brilliantly raunchy and outrageous show about sex that had audiences roaring with laughter, excitement and appreciation at Tramway this weekend.
The show – titled (We Indulge In) A Bit Of Roll Play – is dazzlingly theatrical, starring top disabled comedy star Rosie Jones as CripGod, a gold-clad disability deity who helps disabled folk find their sexual selves, and featuring a hugely vivid and sometimes jaw-dropping final cabaret sequence.
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It is also, though, built around a strong domestic narrative about Ben, a 19-year-old wheelchair user who lives with his straight-but-lively mum and dad, first encountered having sex on their kitchen table after a boozy night out. Ben suffers from depression and a touch of agoraphobia, but also runs a lucrative sideline as an online solo sex star on Only Friends; cue endless hilarity when his parents begin to realise what their son gets up to in his bedroom, and CripGod finally intervenes to sort them all out.
This is, in other words, not so much a play about the sex lives of disabled people, as a play about sex itsef, and how disabled artists can bring a whole new dimension of honesty, daring, and sheer humorous wickedness to our 21st century understanding of it. And everyone involved in this fearless show – from director and co-writer Robert Softley Gale to a terrific comedy cast, and the all-star design, lighting and video team – deserves the highest praise; if only for bringing a show so packed with joy, hilarity and sheer sensual pzazz, to the heart of the nation that invented the word dreich.
Both shows’ runs ended
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