Bar-room success returns in Tron’s new-season line-up

BARFLIES, the show that enthralled Edinburgh Festival Fringe audiences when it played in the capital’s Barony Bar, is to return in 2012 with a national tour that ends in Glasgow’s Tron Theatre.

Based on stories by American cult writer Charles Bukowski, and driven by the pain and joys of drunkenness, Barflies won a Scotsman Fringe First award when it was premiered by the Grid Iron theatre company in 2009.

The Tron Theatre announced the production as part of its 2012 season yesterday.

Barflies’ tour will start in Edinburgh in February in the celebrated Broughton Street pub where it was first staged, and include a week of performances in Wales.

The show was praised by The Scotsman’s critic Joyce McMillan as a story of “booze and sex” brimming with “sheer life-force … which floats along on a boozy tide of delicious music”.

The Tron Theatre’s season from January to April next year, unveiled yesterday, includes Mwana, a coming-of-age story about a young Zimbabwean man educated in Glasgow, torn between his love of the West and the traditional values of his heritage and home. It is directed by Shabina Aslam.

Belfast company Big Telly Theatre brings the touring show Melmoth the Wanderer, billed as a comically dark tale inspired by the film Psycho and the television comedy classic Fawlty Towers.

And the Stellar Quines company brings Ana, a bilingual co-production with a Canadian theatre company, about a woman cursed from birth with the ability to split her identity in moments of crisis.

The theatre’s Long Gallery will show work by painter Peter Howson and fellow artist Robert McSpadyen’s technicolour screenprints.