25-07-2025
- Entertainment
- The Herald Scotland
Review: Theatre 118's debut season ends with a bang
Theatre 118, Glasgow
For the last month, Theatre 118 has hosted four editions of Play of the Week. This is a series of new short plays rehearsed and produced on no budget in a makeshift sixty seat studio space in a former city centre office block the company currently call home.
This has been at the behest of Outerspaces, a Scotland wide initiative to open up unused buildings to artists in order to create work without external financial pressures. While Outerspaces has been embraced mainly by the visual art community, those behind Theatre 118 have seized the opportunity to reveal a seam of untapped theatrical talent that exists outwith the mainstream.
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This final play of the season sets out its store in a spartan high rise in Springburn, where old Ms Maara sits waiting for a knock on the door. A murder has been committed, and a High Court appeal from the apparently guilty party is ongoing. When a man from the council turns up and starts asking Ms Maara some awkward questions, she quickly exposes him as not being the person he says he is. She too, it seems, has a secret identity about to be unleashed.
What follows over the next hour of Alan Muir's play is a devilish debate that tests the moral fibre of each participant. As things take a multitude of fantastical twists and turns, the action enters the realms of supernatural cult fiction and psychological thriller.
This is played out with diabolical vigour in Sara Robertson's tightly wound production, which sees Angela Edgar's Ms Maara and Derek Banner as Bobby Johnson spar for dear life itself in an increasingly wild affair that finishes off Theatre 118's debut season with a bang.
As long as the landlord doesn't sell up in the meantime, the company aim to be back for more in October. In the meantime, audiences have until Saturday to step into the unknown.
