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Scotsman
05-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Scotsman
Theatre reviews: Studio 3
Sign up to our Arts and Culture newsletter, get the latest news and reviews from our specialist arts writers Sign up Thank you for signing up! Did you know with a Digital Subscription to The Scotsman, you can get unlimited access to the website including our premium content, as well as benefiting from fewer ads, loyalty rewards and much more. Learn More Sorry, there seem to be some issues. Please try again later. Submitting... The Brown Doll, Oran Mor, Glasgow ★★★ At first glance, it seems like a strange idea, to take three of the finest shows from artistic director Jemima Levick's years at A Play, A Pie and A Pint, and to re-create them as a studio series in the tiny Changing House at Levick's new theatre, the Tron. Alright Sunshine by Isla Cowan PIC: Eoin Carey As the buzz of excitement around the Tron this week shows, through, this kind of high-powered revisiting of successful shows which often have very short first runs is exactly what Scotland's theatre scene needs at the moment, to remind both artists and audiences of just how much has been achieved over the last difficult half-decade, and how richly enjoyable and rewarding that work can be. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad Featuring just three brilliantly cast actors – Dani Heron, Jo Freer, and Kevin Lennon – the trilogy ends with Fruitcake, a three-handed romantic comedy by Frances Poet that was first seen at Oran Mor in 2022, under the title The Prognostications Of Mikey Noyce; and that combines real charm with a serious streak of lockdown thoughtfulness about the frightening condition of our world. All three actors also appear in the second play, Meghan Tyler's explosively funny and shocking Fleg, directed now, as in 2023, by Dominic Hill of the Citizens' Theatre. Set in loyalist Belfast in the week of the Queen's death, Fleg is a wild and brilliant absurdist comedy about a loyalist called Bobby, who loves the Union flag outside his house with what can only be called an unusual passion. In this play, Lennon and Freer struggle slightly to match the mighty performances given by Harry Ward and Beth Marshall as the original Bobby, and his Benidorm-loving wife Caroline. Heron, though, is splendid in the peachy double part of Tierna, the council worker who tries to lower Bobby's flag for the royal mourning, and the gorgeous pole-dancing embodiment of the 'fleg' itself. Mehren Yar in The Brown Doll It's in the first play of the trilogy, though, that Studio 3 hits five-star heights, with Dani Heron's heartbreaking and brilliant performance of Isla Cowan's outstanding Edinburgh monologue Alright Sunshine. Acclaimed when Hannah Jarrett Scott first performed it in 2022, Alright Sunshine features Nicky, a young policewoman patrolling the Meadows on a hot summer day, who gradually reveals the huge personal cost of maintaining her strong and 'unemotional' professional persona. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad In Debbie Hannan's pitch-perfect new production, Heron gives what is what is possibly the performance of her life as Nicky; in a show that is all the more intense for appearing in a tiny 60-seat space, but that somehow also seems far too big for it, not least in its importance for the increasingly misogynistic world in which we now live. At Oran Mor, meanwhile, the work of platforming a new play every week continues with a first-ever pay by West End actress Cilla Silvia, inspired by her own adoption story. Told in a pensive and slightly untheatrical narrative style, but with immense feeling, The Brown Doll follows 20-something Silvia, who was adopted as a baby by a Swedish family, as she returns to Sri Lanka in search of her birth mother. She is haunted, on her journey, by three mother figures. There is her anxious mum Anna, at home in Sweden. There is Umaima, a woman who helps her in Sri Lanka, but who turns out to know more than she should about the business of farming out Sri Lankan babies to wealthy white families; and there is the elusive figure of her birth mother, Rumisa. In a sense, the story as told in this version seems more like a preliminary outline for a longer and richer treatment, perhaps on screen, than a standalone play. There's no doubt, through, about the importance of the questions it raises; as our cash-crazed world becomes ever more adept at commodifying human life itself.
The Guardian
01-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Studio3 review – triple whammy of comedy is ferociously funny
If you were the gambling kind, you would have hedged your bets on A Play, a Pie and a Pint. What chance of survival would a lunchtime theatre have, especially one committed to staging 30 new plays a year, not to mention throwing in food and drink for the price of a ticket? But survive it has. On the go since 2004, the company has become a Glasgow West End institution. You can see why Jemima Levick, its former artistic director, thought it worth bringing some of its hits with her now she has taken over at the Tron. Studio3 is a three-play compendium, each seen individually or as an all-day marathon, given handsome new productions that star a quick-witted trio of actors: Jo Freer, Dani Heron and Kevin Lennon. There is nothing to link them beyond the chipboard surfaces of Kenny Miller's sets, which grow from cool austerity (Isla Cowan's Alright Sunshine) to red-white-and-blue vulgarity (Meghan Tyler's Fleg) to neurotic interior chaos (Frances Poet's Fruitcake). That, and the sense you can cover a surprising amount of ground in an hour. That is certainly the case in Alright Sunshine, which starts as an Edinburgh answer to Under Milk Wood and ends as a powerful critique of patriarchal oppression. Cowan's monologue is about Nicky, a police officer who keeps a discreet eye over the Meadows, the city-centre park where, as the day progresses, joggers give way to dog walkers, students, exercisers and drunks. In Debbie Hannan's crisp production, Heron navigates superbly from Cowan's amusing roll call of social types to a deeper line about male coercion, control and violence. Nicky is at once the obedient daughter, following her father's orders not to act like a girl; the motherly law-enforcer, keeping tempers in check with a kindly demeanour; and the potential victim, a lone woman walking in an area with a history of sexual assault. As playwright, Cowan packs a breezy comedy with polemical rage. Heron makes an abrupt switch in Fleg (the east Belfast pronunciation of flag) in which she appears as the sexualised projection of a loyalist's love of queen and country. Like a pole dancer togged up in Geri Halliwell's Brit awards dress, she has a dominatrix hold over Lennon's Bobby, whose patriotism is fuelled by self-destructive fury. Like a turbo-charged David Ireland play, Tyler's comedy has a cartoonish swagger, brought out by Dominic Hill's boisterous production. The boozy Bobby is a sort of Ulster unionist Homer Simpson, while his wife, the Marge-like Caroline, is played by Freer with equal abrasiveness. It is a ferocious and funny broadside against intolerance. Funny too is Poet's Fruitcake, previously known as The Prognostications of Mikey Noyce, in which Holly (Freer) discovers her old friend Mikey (Lennon) has not left the house since lockdown for fear of his Nostradamus-style predictions. His gnomic prophesies are wildly open to interpretation (or are they?), but play into our desire to control the future, avoid grief and escape regret. Levick's production has a claustrophobic pandemic energy, wrapping up an idiosyncratic trilogy with a punch. At the Tron theatre, Glasgow, until 16 May
