Theatre reviews: Nomanslanding | Deadline

It's a while since Glasgow's Tramway has witnessed an evening of theatre quite so wide-ranging and rich as the one that took us, last week, from the heights of lavishly-funded international installation art to the latest heartfelt and beautiful show from award-winning youth theatre Junction 25, created from the raw material of their own young hearts, minds and bodies.
NomanslandingNomanslanding
Nomanslanding

Nomanslanding ****

Deadline ****

Both Tramway, Glasgow

In the big space of Tramway 1, a huge sphere sits in the dark, surrounded by wooden scaffolding, with glorious light playing around it; viewed from the gallery, it seems like a remarkable sculpture in itself.

The international project Nomanslanding is also a 25-minute performance, though, first conceived by artists from Australia, Britain and the Netherlands, including Glasgow’s Graham Eatough, to commemorate the First World War; and now reframed to encompass recent refugee experience. We enter through two dark refugee-camp tents, where magnificent singers Judith Williams and Nerea Bello begin to lead us into the echoing, whispering dome.

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There is no water in Tramway, to match the locations for which Nomanslanding was first created; but when the two halves of the sphere briefly slide apart, in a glorious burst of white light, we can still sense the pain of distance, across a gulf of dark, unyielding space.

And in Tramway 4, meanwhile, Junction 25 produce a beautifully-choreographed show called Deadline, about the stress – the sheer exhausting ­tag-race – of today’s goal-driven teenage years.

The show is beautiful, heartbreaking and clever; and its simplicity speaks as loudly as Nomanslanding’s technical complexity, in a powerful reminder that theatre has many languages, each one worth learning in full.

*Nomanslanding runs until 2 July; Deadline, run ended.