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Scotsman
09-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Scotsman
Theatre reviews: Blinded by the Light
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... Blinded by the Light, Barony Theatre, Bo'ness ★★★★ Mistero Buffo, Oran Mor, Glasgow ★★★★ The playwright Sylvia Dow is a Bo'ness woman through and through, profoundly devoted to the Forth shore community where she taught and still lives. She is also fascinated by its history, as a place so rich in shale and coal that it once found itself in the very forefront of Britain's industrial revolution; and her new play Blinded By The Light - premiered in Bo'ness this week, with the Kinneil Brass Band playing up a welcome - is probably best understood as a passionate tribute to that community, and to the ways in which the current crisis in human history resonates through its past, present and future. Blinded by the Light | Contributed Presented by Dow's own company Sylvian Productions, and directed with great skill and feeling by Philip Howard, Blinded By The Light works in two time-frames, telling the fact-based story of the 1982 occupation of the underground tunnels by a group of 12 Kinneil miners determined to prevent the closure of the mine, and also - in a bold shift of perspective - imagining the fate of two young people who have grown up in those same tunnels, in a future where the people of the area have had to take refuge underground from catastrophic climate change. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad The connections between the two stories are sometimes obscure, sometimes ironic, sometimes powerful and poignant. In both cases, though, the play tells the story of ordinary people buffeted by the forces of history, often 'kept in the dark' both literally and metaphorically, and yet somehow surviving, laughing, fighting, loving, telling stories, singing their songs. All of this is beautifully captured and held in focus by a fine company of five, featuring Holly Howden Gilchrist and Reece Montague as young Lily and Freddie, with Barrie Hunter, Rhys Anderson and a charismatic Andrew Rothney as the three 1980s miners, representing Kinneil's 'dirty dozen'. And if Blinded by the Light is a play about working people betrayed and betrayed again by those in power, it is also a life-affirming tribute to their astonishing resilience; and one respectful enough not to flinch from the depth of the crisis we face now, as the machinations of the powerful threaten to rob us even of the beautiful, habitable planet that was once our birthright. Lawrence Boothman in Mistero Buffo | Tommy Ga-Ken Wan First written by Franca Rame and Dario Fo in the 1960s, the great radical monologue Mistero Buffo also offers a working-class view of a world shaped by the greedy, cruel, and over-mighty; but here, the target includes religious institutions that often pervert the message of Christianity in pursuit of wealth and power. The speaker is a giullare or joker - a man who was once a husband, a father and a peasant farmer, but was robbed of everything by a wealthy baron, and became a travelling player. His stories tell of encounters with the sacred, loving and miraculous, as he journeys among the poor people of Italy; and in a strangely timely reflection on this moment of transition between two popes, Lawrence Boothman delivers an extraordinarily vivid and athletic high-camp performance as the joker, culminating in an almost frenzied encounter between a vain, self-aggrandising Pope Boniface, and Christ himself, carrying his cross to Calvary. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad Somewhere in the heart of the show, though, there is a sequence about the massacre of innocents and the death of children that might have been written for this moment in history, the fierce strength of Fo and Rame's dramatic writing ringing out through Joseph Farrell's brilliant Scots translation, now revised for our time. And if Boothman's performance is sometime so frantically physical that it distracts from the force of the text, there's something about its desperate energy that also matches the moment - wild, despairing, and driven to the limits of rage and scorn, bitter laughter, and devastating grief.
The Herald Scotland
08-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Herald Scotland
'Most blasphemous play in history': Review: Mistero Buffo, Glasgow
When the late Robbie Coltrane took to the stage in 1990 with Joseph Farrell's translation, Rame and Fo's comic theological riffs were as damning of assorted establishments as ever. Three and a half decades on again, as Farrell's new Scots version is brought to turbo charged life in this week's edition of A Play, a Pie and a Pint's latest season of lunchtime theatre, not much has changed. Robbie Coltrane in Mistero Buffo (Image: free) Nevertheless, Lawrence Boothman's rude intrusion as an anarchist on the run from the rioting outside the theatre he is seeking sanctuary in is a motor-mouthed tour de force that might still give the Vatican cause for concern if they weren't a bit busy just now. The stage area of Ben Pritchard's production - as in the round as Oran Mor's interior will allow - is regally decked out on designer Heather Grace Currie's set with a crown and a skull for what looks like a traditional performance of Hamlet. As Boothman's thoroughly modern frontline protestor finds his spotlight, he embarks on a rapid fire series of bite-size monologues that recall Italian cinema's one time vogue for themed short story compendiums as much as a wildly camp stand up comedy take on bible studies. Read more As Boothman embodies the spirit of the Giullare – the funny guy holding court – with shape shifting glee, shades of Monty Python's Life of Brian abound in his larger than life portraits of the rabble in this people's eye view of history, co-presented with Ayr Gaiety in association with the Italian Institute of Culture in Edinburgh. A particular standout of Boothman's routine is the Jesus fanboy trying to get his idol's attention as the Messiah raises Lazarus from the dead in a kind of sideshow spectacle. Also in the mix is a bad Pope Boniface doing his very worst in furious fashion. This all comes to an abrupt end when the forces of the law catch up with our hero, by which time he has exposed their masters' inherent ridiculousness in a breathless piece of serious fun.
