JOY OF THE WORM/I LICKED A SLAG'S DEODORANT. To November 2/3.

Glasgow

JOY OF THE WORM
by Pauline Goldsmith and Skye Lonergan
Devised by Andy Arnold and the Company
Arches Theatre To 3 November 2002
Tue-Sun 7pm
Runs 55min No interval

I LICKED A SLAG'S DEODORANT
by Jim Cartwright
Arches Theatre 30 October-2 November 2002
8.30pm Runs 50min No interval

TICKETS 0901 022 0300
www.thearches.co.uk
Review Timothy Ramsden 26 October

Can be seen separately, but together these plays show why a playwright's really necessaryWhat is this Worm? Under an hour (not allowing for a late start), it's taken two writers, and a director devising with the Company. Too many cooks, maybe, haven't done this Worm to a turn, yet it's hard to see how anything might ever have been made of this utter mess.

It's a show that makes you want to insist every drama school would refuse to graduate students till they've signed a self-denying declaration swearing never, never to devise anything ever again.

Yes, there's always Mike Leigh (and used to be Mike Bradwell) doing improvisation-based pieces. But they work with clear structures, and near-authorial discipline (Leigh's taken to being credited as writer these days). Many good people have come to grief over devised work. And this must be amongst the most grievous ofdevices.

Leigh has the ability to cast people who can be induced to extend their performance range. Stuff like this merely lets actors indulge themselves in what comes easy, in what the group accepts or delights in. There's no sense of any critical distance.

Nor of originality. We're in an institution, among people with functional problems. Ho, hum - like so many times on stage before. One's an apparently bright backpacker, sure she'll soon be out of here. (we always need the seemingly sane one). Another perpetually glams herself up, red dress hoooked under black bra, lipstick applied with a magnifying glass that extends her mouth monstrously - a reminder of the magnified eye effect on Loot posters of some years back (someone always has to be sexy).

The third repeatedly resorts to her commode in public, while insisting it's for her private use, sitting with knickers round her knees (what's the point of all our work if we don't have something to sicken audience sensitivities?). Meanwhile Tam Dean Burn keeps bringing in crumbs for the non-existent birds (ah, preciously-beautiful cliche: we're not all about muck and brassneck, you see), believing they've been eaten up when in reality the women have concealed them in their beds - until they deluge the stage (how devastatingly theatrical).

There are, of course, shock tactics galore. How brave, how very done-before, how underwhelming. Cliches of madness and dysfunction, repetitions, group movement sequences, create a crescendo of embarrassment at all the derivative imaginative poverty until the final, naive group stare up towards a vertical light shaft (hope, of course, there's always hope: the world can't afford nihilism nowadays).

Perhaps they're going to get out - though how, why or with what result is unclear. Never mind; it means the whole horrible thing's over and, at last, we can escape this sad waste of time and performing talent.

Just what these people can achieve is clear in the other Arches offering. Jim Cartwright's play might not be his best, but it plumbs similar lower depths of human experience with devastating impact.

It might not surprise that Tam Dean Burn is so strong as the drunk, head-battered creature who finds the possibility of affection with a streetwalker, an offer to take him from his domestic mess while he's in a state where a lick of her stick of deodorant is all he can manage.

But the searing performance is Julie Duncanson's as the crack-addicted, sunk-right-down but still dreaming sex-girl. At the command of 'Uncle Crack' she doesn't so much walk the streets as lean mentally and emotionally disengaged on her patch of wall, offering herself at prices sinking into a deeper and deeper bargain basement.

By turn fake-fond and furious, collapsing like an agonised, maddened foetus on the floor, Duncanson is a frightening, desperate figure, but one always holding on to a sense of dignity. And when, in whatever state of consciousness she's inhabiting, she creates the forms of marriage - lugging Burn's Man into her room with the comment he should be carrying her over the threshold - an unsentimental pity shines through the insistent brutal force of Cartwright's language.

Cast (Worm):
Tam Dean Burn, Julie Duncanson, Pauline Goldsmith, Skye Lonergan

(Deodorant):
Man: Tam Dean Durn
Slag: Julie Duncanson

Director Andy Arnold
Designer: James Miller, from a concept by Francis Gallop
Lighting: Robert Watson
On stage sound:
Laptop: Keith McIvor (Twitch)
'Cello: Janice Murray

2002-10-27 19:53:21