HYPERLYNX.
HYPERLYNX
by John McGrath
Floodtide Theatre Company at The Pleasance, Edinburgh/ Tricycle, London To 14 September 2002
Runs 1hr 50min One interval
Review Timothy Ramsden 13 September.
A fine tribute to a playwright who, through his work , was admired and loved by very many.
'To work' - last words of this solo play as MacLennan's MI5 officer with radical sympathies sets out to duty. And the final dramatic declaration of the playwright, whose death at 67 earlier this year was felt personally by many who had never met him.
Except through his work, principally as artistic director, playwright and aspirant percussionist over many years with both the English and Scottish 7:84 Theatre Companies (7:84 Scotland continues as a producing company; the English edition sadly dwindled out of existence years ago).
However tough the socialist polemic (down to the job ads. which could point out the need for appropriate political convictions in applicants), everything about McGrath spoke human interest. His charismatic personality - and hairstyle - the face which could both smile joyfully and argue ideas with sympathetic consideration.
The humour and vivacity in the scripts, the stream of leading actors in the making, male and female, who worked with the company. The dedicated visits to non-theatre spaces, particularly in the Scottish Highlands, and the determination to make theatre productions that grew from their intended audiences' experiences in form of presentation as well as in subject matter while surprising with new perspectives on familiaraspects of life: work, property, money, and the effects of these on human relationships.
Only David Edgar has consistently produced as much genuinely researched material on stage, and Edgar only gave his plays the vibrancy of 7:84 in the early 1970s pieces with his company The General Will.
So, it's fitting McGrath's last play should uncover the hidden power secrets of today for all of us, and be a family affair - performed by Elizabeth MacLennan, leading actor in so many of her husband's pieces; directed by their daughter.
Sitting in St James Park at lunchtime, British Summer time, on 11 September 2002, this official wonders whether to accept a job infiltrating anti-globalisation protesters.In the course of this she lets us know what the powermen of the Pentagon and Whitehall would rather we didn't know - about a cancer-breeding chemical used to inflate milk-yield in cows and passing into the food-chain. It's outlawed everywhere but the UK and the USA - who make it illegal to identify milk produced this way.
Potentially lethal substances poured over meat, fruit and veg. And, hardly surprising after this, the use of Intelligence to disrupt protests, often with violent agents provacateurs sent in to poison media and public opinion.
The date on which this takes place was a later addition, along with a second act in which MacLennan's character reflects on the human disaster of the air attacks on America. Somehow this sounds less convincing, maybe because the moral shock has to make do without the research base.
But the central section of this act, recalling a supposed interview with an imprisoned sympathiser with the attacks, while it might not be the last moral word, gives a piercing insight into a world where the West is 'them' and the Middle East 'Us'.
Hardly surprising there's an autumnal, elegaic touch to the performance, which takes away from the gathering force of argument in places while giving a positive sense of reflection elsewhere.
If the powers that never hear the kind of thing McGrath's saying, or dismiss it as bias and propaganda, the world's set for continuing misery at the least, disaster at the worst.
Thank goodness, friend to humanity as he always was, John McGrath lived - however too short - at least enough to give us this final word in progress.
Performer: Elizabeth MacLennan
Director: Kate McGrath
Designer: Jenny Tiramani
Lighting: Julian McCready
Sound: Rich Walsh
2002-09-15 20:02:13