REASONS TO BE CHEERFUL. To 10 April.
Tour
REASONS TO BE CHEERFUL
by Martin McCardie
7:84 Theatre Company Scotland Tour to 10 April 2004
Aims at simple targets and lands with a resounding plop.Make your way to the auditorium 10 minutes early for a strife-torn video tour of recent history - miners' strike, Lockerbie bomb, nice meetings with pre-Kuwait Saddam, 9/11 etc. It shows life edited into drama more vivid than anything that's to follow.
7:84's play, inspired by socialist comedian Mark Steel's memoirs, has things going for it. But it's a mish-mash of political theatre styles. There's serious(ish) debate, though a committed Scottish socialist like Bobby sympathetic if gently self-mocking in Frank Gallagher's well-judged performance - is always going to outwit a smart-suited Blairite like Maureen Carr's earnest Kate. He doesn't have to be right (though that's where the script's heart is); he's just more witty, and so more interesting as a character.
Then there's post-Dario Fo comedy; it's Bobby's 43rd birthday, on the 17th floor and there's fire down below, with helpful interruptions from the block's concierge via the intercom. Comedy and politics demand the characters' reactions to being toasted from the feet up vary between understandable concern and stretches of oblivion, as the script's style veers wider than a skyscraper in the wind.
More individually, there's some debate over the role of humour in political struggle. How successful can a comedian become on TV before he's sold-out to the Establishment? Should he use public exposure as a mirthmaker to slip in comments about, say, Nicaragua?
Bobby's answers would be that the sell-out's fairly instant, the Nicaragua comments de rigeur. The script here allows Neil McKinven's coolly smart Michael (Mickey to his friends and fans) to become at last more than a Bobby's straight-man.
7:84 field a fine trio and there's no denying Moley Campbell's set is apt, with Bobby's flat sporting a panorama window doubling as TV screen for the video moments at other times becoming a vista of tower-blocks and the M8. It suggests issues about media and real views of life the play doesn't explore, though what is there passes entertainingly in Stuart Davids' production. If consciousness-raising starts at floor-level there's something to learn here; but are today's audiences anywhere so unaware that this is what's needed?
Bobby: Frank Gallagher
Michael: Neil McKinven
Kate: Maureen Carr
Director: Stuart Davids
Designer: Moley Campbell
Lighting: Dave Shea
Sound: John Scott
Video editor: Diane Jardine
2004-03-09 14:59:37