![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Not that Scottish play
Jan. 29th, 2010 11:00 pmWe went to see A Wee Home from Home at Northern Stage, knowing next to nothing about it. We learned that the New Rope String Band were playing at an after-show, belated Burns Night Party, looked at the theatre listing and saw that it had Michael Marra in it, and thought, OK, that'll do...
Sometimes it's an additional pleasure to see something completely unprepared by advance information. This wasn't one one of those occasions: there were things about A Wee Home from Home that baffled me, which could have been resolved by a little advance information - I hadn't, for example, realised that it was a revival of a piece first staged twenty years ago. I'd expected a conventional play, with added music, so the extent to which the piece is danced, rather than acted, was a surprise, though not an unpleasant one. Finally, there were aspects of the play (I now realise, in the light of the post-show discussion) which I would have needed not just foreknowledge but footnotes to grasp.
It's a two-hander. Michael Marra plays a cryptic figure, never named, never quite identified, a sort of one man chorus. He reads his newspaper, he sings his songs, he doesn't answer questions. When Frank McConnell bursts onto the stage, wielding his suitcase with all the exuberance of Gene Kelly ("Gotta dance!") and hammers on the door, it's Marra who tells him "They're not in," and sends him off to revisit the town and his own life, his early childhood, his schooldays, his working days as a welder...
It's a familiar narrative. Because we'd been talking the previous day about Alan Moore's The Birth Caul, I was reminded of that: it's about growing up in a situation where education and social pressures ensure that it's about the opposite of growth. A Wee Home from Home is specifically Glaswegian, but you probably had to be Glaswegian yourself to appreciate the full extent of that: I recognised the unholy alliance of religion and football which divides the city between Rangers and Celtic, but the refrain
Michael Marra's songs were powerful and vivid; and I felt I knew where I was with them. Political theatre, political songs, always an effective combination. Frank McConnell's dancing was more disconcerting: energetic, athletic, graceful, like something from a Hollywood musical, quite unexpected in this almost agit-prop context. Perhaps it was this sense of double vision, of seeing live something I've normally only seen on screen, which made me see something over-emphatic in the dance, as if Frank McConnell were not so much dancing as acting someone dancing, or perhaps that came from the extent to which the dance had to approach mime in rder to carry the narrative.
As I've said, I was puzzled about when the play was set; the childhood, particularly, seemed curiously old-fashioned. I produced an interpretation which answered the question "Who are you?", which Marra never answers by seeing him as McConnell's older self. We think we are seeing a man in his thirties or forties returning home and retracing his childhood, but in fact we are seeing the multi-layered memories of a man nearer to sixty. That's still possible, but it's simpler to realise that the play itself is twenty years old. Even then, Glasgow was beginning the process of reinventing itself: twenty years on, it's possible to reject Glasgow's transformation into the City of Culture, but is it possible just to ignore it?
After the play we went downstairs for music and clowning from the Ropes, including Tim declaiming that little known masterpiece of Robert Burns, Ode to a Deep-Fried Mars Bar (adressing, of course, a genuine deep-fried Mars bar); he also recited Tam o'Shanter, illustrated by a mixture of film and live action. And there was dancing: not traditional Scottish dancing, because there was a caller (long story), and there was time for three dances, of which the first was the Gay Gordons (not my favourite) and the last, when there were only five couples still standing, was Waves of Tory (video here) which we danced to a set of Joe Scurfield's tunes.
Sometimes it's an additional pleasure to see something completely unprepared by advance information. This wasn't one one of those occasions: there were things about A Wee Home from Home that baffled me, which could have been resolved by a little advance information - I hadn't, for example, realised that it was a revival of a piece first staged twenty years ago. I'd expected a conventional play, with added music, so the extent to which the piece is danced, rather than acted, was a surprise, though not an unpleasant one. Finally, there were aspects of the play (I now realise, in the light of the post-show discussion) which I would have needed not just foreknowledge but footnotes to grasp.
It's a two-hander. Michael Marra plays a cryptic figure, never named, never quite identified, a sort of one man chorus. He reads his newspaper, he sings his songs, he doesn't answer questions. When Frank McConnell bursts onto the stage, wielding his suitcase with all the exuberance of Gene Kelly ("Gotta dance!") and hammers on the door, it's Marra who tells him "They're not in," and sends him off to revisit the town and his own life, his early childhood, his schooldays, his working days as a welder...
It's a familiar narrative. Because we'd been talking the previous day about Alan Moore's The Birth Caul, I was reminded of that: it's about growing up in a situation where education and social pressures ensure that it's about the opposite of growth. A Wee Home from Home is specifically Glaswegian, but you probably had to be Glaswegian yourself to appreciate the full extent of that: I recognised the unholy alliance of religion and football which divides the city between Rangers and Celtic, but the refrain
There's the tree that never grew,lost some of its force because I didn't recognise this dourly negative description of the city's coat of arms.
There's the bird that never flew,
There's the fish that never swam,
There's the bell that never rang.
Michael Marra's songs were powerful and vivid; and I felt I knew where I was with them. Political theatre, political songs, always an effective combination. Frank McConnell's dancing was more disconcerting: energetic, athletic, graceful, like something from a Hollywood musical, quite unexpected in this almost agit-prop context. Perhaps it was this sense of double vision, of seeing live something I've normally only seen on screen, which made me see something over-emphatic in the dance, as if Frank McConnell were not so much dancing as acting someone dancing, or perhaps that came from the extent to which the dance had to approach mime in rder to carry the narrative.
As I've said, I was puzzled about when the play was set; the childhood, particularly, seemed curiously old-fashioned. I produced an interpretation which answered the question "Who are you?", which Marra never answers by seeing him as McConnell's older self. We think we are seeing a man in his thirties or forties returning home and retracing his childhood, but in fact we are seeing the multi-layered memories of a man nearer to sixty. That's still possible, but it's simpler to realise that the play itself is twenty years old. Even then, Glasgow was beginning the process of reinventing itself: twenty years on, it's possible to reject Glasgow's transformation into the City of Culture, but is it possible just to ignore it?
After the play we went downstairs for music and clowning from the Ropes, including Tim declaiming that little known masterpiece of Robert Burns, Ode to a Deep-Fried Mars Bar (adressing, of course, a genuine deep-fried Mars bar); he also recited Tam o'Shanter, illustrated by a mixture of film and live action. And there was dancing: not traditional Scottish dancing, because there was a caller (long story), and there was time for three dances, of which the first was the Gay Gordons (not my favourite) and the last, when there were only five couples still standing, was Waves of Tory (video here) which we danced to a set of Joe Scurfield's tunes.
