A Play, A Pie and A Pint. - Jocky Wilson Said.

Jocky Wilson Said. Oran Mor, Glasgow. March 2017

Jocky Wilson Said by Jane Livingstone and Jonathon Cairney. Theatre review.

When Dexy's Midnight Runners appeared on Top of the Pops in 1982 playing their version of the Van Morrison song "Jackie Wilson Said" instead of a picture of soul legend Jackie Wilson, behind them on stage was a large picture of Fife's own world darts champion, Jocky Wilson. This is often cited as a famous television mistake, but the truth is more mundane and it was actually done on purpose as a joke, with Jocky Wilson a very well-kent face at the time. Now he is maybe more well known for that incident than for his darts playing. 

He looked an unlikely sporting champion, which was a big reason that people warmed to him. Short, overweight, toothless, and smoking and drinking between throws, he had the appearance of the archetypal bloke from the pub darts team who goes on to be champion of the world. He did that twice, in 1982 and 1989, in the days before there were two rival darts championships.

Jocky Wilson

This week's play at Oran Mor's A Play, A Pie and A Pint series, twists the Dexy's song title to present a monologue with Grant O'Rourke as Jocky Wilson. It is based on an episode in his life in the days before he was world champion and finds him stranded in the Nevada desert, 180 mile (get it?) from a competition in Las Vegas he should be at. Trying to hitch a lift he chats to "Spike", a roadside cactus and brings out fascinating stories from his early life that were all new to me. With a glass half full attitude he looks back to his early days in an orphanage with his brother, his previous work including days in the Seafield Colliery and his time spent in Kirkcaldy's Lister Bar, where he first took up darts. His arguments with darts officials, temporary ban for punching one of them, and the grief his Argentinian wife Malvina got at the time of the Falklands War also add to his colourful past which I knew nothing about. 

Grant O'Rourke, who acts in TV series Outlander, makes a good Jocky Wilson, and also does decent impersonations of other characters, including a haughty Eric Bristow. Some of the best lines are direct lifts from Jocky Wilson's autobiography, such as

"I can manage just about anything with my gums. I can chew a steak provided it's well done. I can even eat apples. Great Yarmouth rock and nuts are the only things that defeat me"

The play gives you a rounded picture of Scotland's first ever darts world champion, without the later downward arc his life took. A man fondly remembered by many, and in his home town also with a wee display in his honour in Kirkcaldy Galleries. 

Flower, Bird, Wind, Moon. Oran Mor, Feb 2015. Theatre review

Flower, Bird, Wind, Moon. Oran Mor, Feb 2015. Theatre review

With changing my rota at work I no longer get the chance so often to take in Oran Mor's lunchtime A Play , A Pie and A Pint but I was lucky enough to see this week's offering. "Flower, Bird, Wind, Moon" by Paddy Cunneen is named after a Japanese saying (花鳥風月).  This four-character aphorism means something like "look at nature and learn about yourself". 

In the short play Billy Mack plays an English teacher with a love of Noh plays, who leaves his life behind after struggling with the death of his wife. For a few weeks he lives out a fantasy of studying Noh theatre in Japan for a few weeks. He plays opposite the fantastic Tomoko Komura, who acts as pretty much all of Japan, from a bullet train ticket inspector to an optometrist and the three distinct Noh teachers ("sensei"). She also plays Josei, a Japanese woman he meets who has a love of Noh theatre and her own sorrows. 

The storyline is a bit predictable but they both play it with great warmth and humour and Tomoko Komura's turns make you wish she had a less subsidiary role in the story. 

As the programme notes mention that the writer took parts of this story from his own experiences studying Noh in Kyoto I think I feel a wee bit sorry for his poor teachers over there.  

Review : Mrs Barbour's Daughters, A Play A Pie and A Pint, Oran Mor.

Theatre Review : Mrs Barbour's Daughters, A Play A Pie and A Pint, Oran Mor. Oct 2014

I'm only after writing about Glasgow's radical past last week, when one of the people I was reading about, Mary Barbour, is remembered in a play at Oran Mor's A Play, A Pie and a Pint series a few days later.

In "Mrs Barbour's Daughters" by A J Taudevin (which is on in Glasgow this week before transferring to the Traverse in Edinburgh) an 87 year old woman is facing eviction from her crumbling tenement. Libby McArthur plays her carer niece and whilst they talk about the present day and worries of the Bedroom Tax, Mary, played by Anna Hepburn is overwhelmed with memories from her early family life. With a clever bit of direction they easily flit back and forwards through the decades as Mary remembers her more politically minded sister, played by Gail Watson (who plays Katie Morag's mum on cbeebies, and showed her singing prowess previously in Oran Mor's "A Bottle of Wine and Patsy Cline").

It is easy to see the modern day comparisons, with Mary Barbour getting woman politically motivated in the rent strikes of the 1915 and modern day women becoming a force for change in the mass meetings of the Women for Indy campaign recently. Mary in the play feels that she was taken for granted and missed out on a life, whilst her mother and sister were off campaigning and living theirs, but she still has a stubborn glint in her eye.

The whole play is lifted by two musical moments. Once when Gail Watson raises the spirits with a rendition of "John MacLean's March" and then in a rousing finale that brought a wee tear to my eye. Libby McArthur also does a standout turn as she becomes Mary Barbour, delivering a speech urging us to fight (she looked uncannily like her I thought). It was a clever way of portraying a time just beyond living memory.

The only issue I had with the play was that it felt incredibly positive and optimistic at the end, which just isn't something that sits comfortably with a Glaswegian like me.

Like a couple of my great-great-great grandparents, Mary Barbour was the daughter of a weaver from Kilbarchan. She became politically active during WW1 when she led the rent strike campaigns in Govan. In 1920 she stood as the Labour candidate in Fairfield ward and became one of Glasgow's first woman Councillors, where she continued her campaigns. If you want to find out more about Mary Barbour and the campaign to get a lasting memorial to her in Glasgow look here at RememberMaryBarbour.
My reflections on Glasgow's other neglected radicals is here.

Sophocles and The Brothers Grimm - Theatre Review, Glasgow, Nov. 2013

Antigone, Strathclyde Theatre Group, Cottiers Theatre, Glasgow

Guilty, Play a Pie and a Pint, Oran Mor, Glasgow

I have been off work this week and am meant to be doing Christmas shopping. Fortunately there has been plenty of stuff on in Glasgow to let me avoid doing much of that. So pretending I was researching for our holiday in Greece next year I went to Cottiers Theatre, where Strathclyde Theatre Group are performing Sophocles classic play, Antigone. STG are a community theatre group/ amateur dramatics society that has been on the go for 40 years, and certainly has an ambitious programme, heavily flavoured with classics that appeal to people wanting to see a play from their exam syllabus, from Arthur Millar to Shakespeare. They lost their usual home in Strathclyde University last year when they had to move on from the Ramshorn Theatre there and seem to be regulars in Cottiers now. One advantage am-dram can have over professional theatre is in being able to call upon enough willing volunteers to fill every part in a large cast, or a Greek chorus.

As well as seeing this as research for trip to Thebes in the summer, I was also interested in seeing the play, as when I was assistant stage manager at our secondary school drama club, for some bizarre reason Antigone was one of the plays we did, with Rosemary from my year in the lead role.

Knightswood Secondary School does Antigone

Antigone is set in Thebes, the greatest city state in Ancient Greece before Alexander the Great conquered the land and destroyed the city. Thebes was also the mythical setting for stories of Dionysus, Heracles and Oedipus. The two brothers of Antigone, daughter of Oedipus and Jocasta, have died on the battlefield on opposing sides. King Creon has proclaimed that one shall be mourned as a hero, the body of the other to be left on the battlefield, as carrion, disgraced. Antigone refuses to accept this, disobeys the king and buries him herself. She is caught and sentenced to death. Creon's stubborn pride leads to tragedy for his family, punished by the gods he displeased. This production seemed to be set it in the middle east or Egypt going by the the costumes and music, which jarred a bit for a Grecophile like me. Christian Zanone, as the sentry who discovered Antigone, put on a fine turn, and Creon was suitably proud, stubborn and chastened. The blind prophet Tiresius was kind of played as a transsexual, but on reading up on it later I see that Hera turned Tiresius into a woman for 7 years, so that's that explained. Anyway I enjoyed the story, if a few mumbled lines made it hard to work out exactly why Creon and his son suddenly fell out and how Antigone and Haemon met their end exactly. As tragedies go, Antigone is pretty tragic, and my sympathies lay with the heroine rather than the foolish king. The moral for him is to learn from his mistakes.

My son did the Wizard of Oz in his school's drama club last year. Obviously when I was at school in the 80s drama teachers were a bit more ambitious.

From a cast of sixteen to a cast of two as Lesley Hart and Louise Ludgate take their turn doing a lunchtime play for Oran Mor's flourishing A Play, A Pie and A Pint. This was another co-production with Aberdeen's Lemon Tree Theatre and will be on up there next week. Detective Black is questioning Blanca, who has recently left home to lodge with some geology students, about her missing step-mother. Lousie Ludgate in her lovely north-eastern dialect is stroppy, bullying and just a wee bit scary. As my kids for years have delighted in reading the grim endings of the original versions of well-known fairy tales, I could see what way the story was going but it was good fun watching it get there and a full house of Glasgow's west-end, lunchtime pie munchers was chortling away throughout (quiche is also available though tastes rubbish with gravy or brown sauce I imagine). The jousting of two fine actors, a pie and a pint of Guinness - a bargain at £8 on a Wednesday.

Theatre Review: A Play, a Pie and a Pint : Doras Dùinte (Closed Door)

When I've got a day off I regularly spend my lunchtime at Oran Mor enjoying a pie with gravy, a pint of Guiness and a 45 minute play (on Mondays for only £10). This week, after now having done a few hundred plays, was their first attempt to do one in Gaelic. This seemed appropriate as the Mòd was in Paisley (or Pàislig) last week and we were informed subtitles and animation would make it accessible to all.

My Scotch pie, though obviously
 not one from Oran Mor

Written by Catriona Lexy Campbell the play, Doras Dùinte (Closed Door), involved an agoraphobic woman in an isolated cottage looking for a lodger, who turns out to be not quite as he seems. The set up was fine, but after that the story made not a lot of sense, and the denouement seemed to come suddenly, was rather confused and inconclusive. At the end my reaction was "Eh?".

I had hoped to say that it was an unparallelled success, but it wasn't. The actors were speaking in Gaelic, as advertised, but the idea of having the subtitles (and then only every second or third line) projected behind the performers made no sense. As the actors were pretty static on stage, they obscured almost all of the lines for the audience. This meant you were no longer following them, but juking left and right trying to make out the odd word. Even then, I'm not sure I missed much of the plot.

Maybe if you speak Gaelic the whole story made more sense, but it seemed a bit half-finished. A work in progress maybe?

Serial Killers and Mad Doctors

Driving Manuel, at Oran Mor by Denise Mina

Harry Hill, Sausage Time, King's Theatre, Glasgow

Just a quick review of two shows that I've been to this week in Glasgow which maybe highlights the rather random and scatter gun way that I decide what to go and see.

I often end up going to Oran Mor for a lunchtime "Play, a Pie and a Pint" on my day off from work and one of the best plays that I've seen there was by author Denise Mina ("A Drunk Woman Looks At The Thistle"). Also, you've got to acknowledge that she is a person with some taste, making one of the characters in the book Garnethill a Partick Thistle fan (although if memory serves he didn't survive until the end).

I think if she were writing that book today though, after we've just stuffed Livingston FC 6-1, she would have to change a couple of lines from this paragraph. "Partick Thistle FC, known as The Jags, is one of the few Glasgow football teams not associated with either side of the Protestant/Catholic sectarian divide. Their fans are known locally for their passive but exceptional eccentricity and the team are known nationally for being crap". I digress.

Denise Mina had another play on this week, Driving Manuel. The play centres on the true story of Peter Manuel, a serial killer in Glasgow of the 1950's and his bizarre meeting one evening with a relative of three of his victims, William Watt, who the Police of the day believed was responsible for the crimes. It is an intriguing story but it seemed mis-cast with Andy Gray as the malevolent killer, more famed for his hammy comedy acting. At times lines were played for laughs, whilst we were at other times presented with the horrific violence of his crimes. The mood was therefore rather uneven and it felt more like a work in progress that the finished article.

The Glasgow Comedy Festival is in town just now, so when we had the chance of a baby-sitter on Friday night it was a case of seeing who was performing that evening and giving it a go. This had the added bonus of us not having to endure the pain of watching the Scotland team in action against Wales. We plumped for Harry Hill off of the telly, touring just now with his new live show, Sausage Time. I have to say there weren't many belly laughs, but it was spectacularly bonkers in the best traditions of meaningless nonsense such as Vic and Bob and the like specialise in. How exactly do you start off training to be a doctor then end up trying to play James Bond tunes on a trombone, drinking a bucket of water whilst bouncing up and down in a paddling pool? You do feel for the poor souls dragged on stage for these things, who are on a hiding to nothing, but when one of them is a scientist who works on kitchen sinks it almost sounds as if he was a planted Harry Hill character.

As it turns out we made the right choice for our evening's entertainment with Scotland losing 1-2 in the end. That, at least, was predictable.

There Can Be Only One

A Play, a Pie and a Pint.

The offering at this week's Play, a Pie and a Pint at Oran Mor is a collaboration with the Traverse Theatre in Edinburgh (where it'll be next week), "A Respectable Widow Takes to Vulgarity" by Douglas Maxwell. I've already enjoyed "Thank You" featuring Colin McCreadie in the current season (Herald review here) and there are plenty of other tasty looking morsels to come. However it has to be said that in my opinion the current Scotch pies (sponsored by McLays) aren't quite up to the steak pies from before. I like a Scotch pie as much as the next person, and when I'm at Firhill I wouldn't dream of buying a steak pie. Conversely I wouldn't dream of buying a Scotch pie in a chippy but often have a steak pie supper. In my mind when I'm in Oran Mor I feel the old steak pie fits the bill,  buy hey-ho things change and I guess it's horses for courses, as it were.

The play starts with the recently widowed  Annabelle Love (Joanna Tope, who used to be Dr Clare Scott in Emmerdale) meeting a swearing employee of her husband at his funeral. She becomes intrigued by a man who can swear away casually like her husband used to, and gets him to teach her how to do it. Around this there are a lot of funny lines, but also there is a recognition of the use of language to restrict people, demean them, draw class distinctions. It is also about her grieving and how this man that reminds her of her husband's youthful days helps her. Anyway she has a go at a manifesto of 'down with small talk, up with swearing'. It is good to see someone take the time to think about language this way, because many people (most people?) swear unthinkingly, it is part of expressing yourself yet there is so much faux outrage at misplaced expletives. As James Kelman (a man whose use of working class language seems to wind people up endlessly) said in a recent interview "People can use swear words to emphasise the beauty of something – so it's not really a swear word at all. If you say something is 'fucking beautiful', how can it be swearing, because you're emphasising the beauty of something."

I like to ponder the way that people unconsciously use language to show that they are better than others. At school we had a great English teacher who used to encourage us to use the Glaswegian colloquialisms and grammar in class that we used in the playground (although he drew a line at swearing), yet now we can be upbraided by snotty youths if we unthinkingly use phrases such as "have did" in conversation. Anyway the play is funny and thought provoking, and there is plenty of mileage in this simple premise. There is one part where she is trying to invent her own swear word for the part of the male body that still has a racist term which hasn't gone out of use. One person in the audience guffawed as she worked it out before the actors revealed the answer, a kind of "Eureka" moment as it were.

Glasgow Film Festival

Trundling on until the 24th of February is the Glasgow Film Festival. I haven't really been able to see as much of this as I'd hoped, in particular I was kicking myself that I missed the Sonic Cineplex day at the Arches. Jane Birkin's concert and documentary screening was part of it and a very pleasant way to spend an evening.

I also went to see the latest Studio Ghibli film with my kids, From Up On Poppy Hill. It was beautifully drawn, a million miles away from the usual CGI animation. The story is less bizarre than some other Studio Ghibli films, but does take a few odd turns before landing on safer ground. It is set in a 1960s Japanese High School as they try to save the good things from the past in a Japan determinedly looking to modernise, much like cinema animation I suppose.

My other highlight from the festival was a showing of Highlander on the big screen. If you don't know it, where have you been hiding? In this the French accented Highlander (Christopher Lambert) battles the other immortals, which include an Egyptian called Juan Sanchez Villalobos Ramirez, chief metallurgist to the King of Spain, played by Sean Connery, to win "the prize". Released in 1986 I went to see it in the ABC on Sauchiehall Street when it was still a cinema, with three girls from school, oddly enough, and have watched it repeatedly since on VHS and nowadays on DVD and ITV2. It is unadulterated hokum, but endlessly quotable and you either get it or you don't. Graeme Virtue, who introduced it at the festival, gets it. Two of my friends who un-ironically named their sons Connor after the main character get it. The fact that there were numerous (duff) sequels made, a TV series, manga, cartoons and I believe a remake is in production means that there are plenty of other people who get it. Not everyone gets it, strange as this may seem. I've watched it so many times I can almost recite it word perfectly and can spot all the continuity errors before they happen, so it was fun to have them again up on the big screen. Despite the best efforts of many of the post-pub audience to find laughs at the most anodyne sequences, they still didn't manage to ruin it for me. I felt sorry for the couple sat in front of me who walked out after 15 minutes of the guffawing, but for those who could ignore them they at least kept it to a gentle giggling during bonnie Heather's demise. It's fine to have fun, but a bit bullying to decide this is the way everyone is to have fun.

As Annabelle Love may have said, "Fucking arseholes".

NB - my Highlander fact you mightn't know unless you are as sad as me, Clancy Brown was excellent as the Kurgan, he is just about recognisable as the horrible guard in Shawshank Redemption, but did you know that he is Mr Krabs in Spongebob? Aha!

 

Eclectic Glasgow Entertainments #26

Reviewing some Glasgow theatre offerings, poetry and music from this week

Alasdair Gray gave an interesting interview in The Observer at the weekend, talking of his feeling of running out of time to do all the things he has wanted. He seems more productive than ever at present with his decoration of the Oran Mor interior, a new collection of his short stories released this week and his tiled wall at Hillhead subway station unveiled recently. He is often described as a polymath; playwright, author, artist and activist. He grew up in an environment in Glasgow where artists could meet up, share ideas and try them out. One place you see young artists mixing with old hands and getting to try stuff out is at Oran Mor's A Play, a Pie and a Pint.

One person who I've seen giving a reading alongside Alasdair Gray recently is Alan Bissett, a man with many strings to his bow. He is an author, performer, has written plays for Oran Mor's A Play, a Pie and a Pint and is active in the 'Yes' campaign for independence. He has admitted light-heartedly on Twitter to being exhausted by his role in the independence campaign but he brought plenty of energy to his one man show "The Red Hourglass", which reached The Arches last week. Originally performed at the Edinburgh Fringe last summer he played the parts of several spiders being observed in a St Andrews research facility. The parts were individually well written and performed, but the pieces struggled to hang together to make a coherent point, despite the final summing up by the research scientist. He has often collaborated with others through Oran Mor and seems not to be lacking in confidence or ambition. The artistic community of Scotland isn't enormous though, and contributes so much to defining us, entertaining us, making us think. Like your corner shop, unless you use it you will wake up one day and find that it has gone and all you have left is that huge, bland multinational brand you've got to drive to. I guess that is the point I'm trying to make in blogging all these events, trying to help people see what things are going on.

This week a A Play, a Pie and a Pint has a class act in town with Bill Paterson as writer and performer in Astonishing Archie. I think I'm right in saying it is based on the bones of a 30 minute piece he wrote as a radio play a few years ago to perform with Stanley Baxter. Sadly Richard Wilson had to withdraw from this performance for health reasons. He is ably replaced by Kenny Ireland, who recently directed The Cone Gatherers which I saw in September at the Theatre Royal. Sharon Small of Inspector Lynley Mysteries fame and the voice of Alex Norton also feature. The star qualities of Bill Paterson has drawn a larger than usual gaggle of Kelvinside ladies and gentlemen to Oran Mor and the place was packed when I went there on Tuesday, and I can confidently say that I was about 30 years younger than most of the other spectators. Two brothers born either side of the war view the world (and music) differently and fight it out over their pal Archie's farewell funeral music - Sinatra or Elvis. Bill Paterson's Allan and the script are warm and witty. A tale of sibling rivalry fought out through the medium of musical tastes, it is brought together nicely by Sharon Small's Church of Scotland minister. It's good, gentle fun and I could see it working well on BBC Scotland as a 60 minute play, early evening on Hogmanay before Only an Excuse.

Tam Dean Burn

Cross pollination was in evidence again down at SWG3, in the Jim Lambie built "poetry club". On Thursday night monthly Edinburgh arts project "Neu! Reekie!" visited Glasgow for its second outing here, its 26th edition in total. This Edinburgh scheme describes itself as an 'anti-cabaret' and keeps itself so under the radar that this is the first time I've come across it (which maybe just shows how Glasgow-centric I am). Whoever put this evening together chose well. First up Kevin Williamson (Rebel Inc founder) and Michael Pederson introduced Tam Dean Burn performing a Bertold Brecht poem on New York boom and bust, today on Thanksgiving Day. All very cool to a soundtrack by JD Twitch, a Gershwin Dub.

Graeme Ronald, in solo Remember Remember guise did his ephemeral, wistful stuff in a beautiful 30 minute set (I could happily have had the same again). He's a multi-instrumentalist who started off doing his stuff as a soloist, looping and repeating sounds as diverse as guitar chords and bubble wrap pops to make atmospheric, melodic tunes. Playing electric guitar with interference from an iPod tonight was a new one for me. If you haven't picked up their album (as a band) The Quickening, go get it now.

Next up was the ever entertaining Liz Lochhead, who changed her readings to follow the vibe of the evening, reading "Ira and George" (Gershwin). It was also nice to hear her powerful poem "Listen" again, the voice of a kid at a Children's Panel. She is a great advert for poetry as an aural rather than a written form and a great reader. Her corbie (crow) says 100 times what Ted Hughes's manages in its opening speech from her play Mary Queen Of Scots Got Her Head Chopped Off.

Liz Lochhead

Scottish BAFTA winner and now Oscar long-list nominated animator Will Anderson then introduced his film "The Making of Longbird", a graduation project from Edinburgh College of Art which was a highlight of the evening. Look out for the Longbird, funny, clever. Very entertaining. Low Miffs front man, Leo Condi and a three piece band finished off an eclectic evening with some songs by Bertold Brecht and Jacques Brel and we finally got to see the Flying Scotsman sculpture/ smoke machine high up on the wall in action. Bit jealous of Edinburgh getting these Neu! Reekie! evenings on a monthly basis and I'll look out for the next Glasgow one now.

Demons, Birds, Sisters and Passion

Demons at Oran Mor, Ugo Rondinone at The Common Guild, Guid Sisters at the Kings and Arvo Part's Passio at Kelvingrove

 

I'm a big fan of Dave McLellan's Play, a Pie and a Pint at Oran Mor and do try to get along whenever I'm at a lunchtime loose end. The £10 is on the steep side, but you do get a pint or a glass of wine, a steak pie and as much gravy as your plate can take, plus I suppose you save another 50p if you pick up a free Evening Times there, as they are one of the sponsors. The main attraction however is seeing a complete variety of performances, plays, styles, actors and writing from old pros to new young writers. This week was a companion piece to the 250th play, Jean-Jaque Rousseau Show, which was written by a group of writers, a piece of musical/ comedy/ cabaret. The team involved felt they had more that they wanted to say which lead to "Demons", again 5 actors singing, rotating through various musical instruments and sketches in a political cabaret. The peg it is hung upon is the quote from Owen Jones's book, Chavs,  "Demonization is the ideological backbone of an unequal society." In a variety of sketches they illustrate the point that the poor are being made the scapegoat for the bourgeoisie, as explained by Marx and Engels as the (Groucho) Marx brothers. It finishes with John McGrath's song from the Wildcat days ‘Get them out, make them work, They don’t own us, whatever they say." It all needs saying, but it is hard not to be a wee bit saddened by the fact that political theatre has had to dust off the old songs a quarter of a century after they were written. At least there seems a group of young actors and writers looking to do this stuff.

 

Ugo Rondinone, 'primitive'

On Friday evening we  swung by The Common Guild up on Park Circus to see their current exhibition, an installation of little bronze sculptures of birds, scattered throughout the building by Swiss artist Ugo Rondinone.

They are all individuals, but simply made and quite comical. As you carefully step through them it's hard not to think of the malevolence in Hitchcock's film, The Birds, rather than the benign wee innocent faces of Anthony Gormley's terracotta figures in 'Field'. It is a lot of fun, and our three kids loved it. 

Saturday night was meant to be me watching rubbish on TV and getting an early night as my children don't get the concept of clocks go back an hour (as I expected Sunday breakfast started at 5am). Meanwhile my wife and her mum went to the Kings Theatre to see The Guid Sisters starring Karen Dunbar, a Scots version of the French Québécois play, Les Belles-soeurs by Michael Tremblay. They'd been looking forward to it for a while and it had great reviews (Herald****, Scotsman****, Guardian*****, The Observer****) so I was surprised when they came home at the back of 9pm. My initial fear was that they'd been driven home by all the people roaming the streets of Glasgow that night dressed as zombies or schoolgirls,. However the truth of the matter was that they'd walked out at the interval. Sadly they did not enjoy it at all, finding it almost impossible to hear what was being said in a jumble of mixed up accents by the numerous characters talking and shouting over each other. What they could make out they found couthie and stilted. In the past year they've seen and enjoyed plays in similar Scottish scenarios (Men Should Weep and The Steamie for example) but this must have been a trial for them to have actually left. You have been warned!

Sunday night I went to the second half of the Arvo Pärt weekend, a further episode in the ongoing series of concerts in Glasgow under the "Minimal" banner. Whereas some of the others in the series are more commonly labelled as minimalists (Steve Reich, Philip Glass) Pärt's piece tonight is minimalist in the way that Gregorian chants are stark and minimalist. It is a choral telling by the Estonian composer of St John's Passion, sung in the Latin, accompanied by an oboe, cello, violin, bassoon and tonight by the organ in Kelvingrove Art Galleries. Maybe not everyone's idea of a great night out, but in the beautiful setting of the main hall of Kelvingrove Art Gallery with its echoey acoustics and grand surroundings it was fantastic. The choir was great and a joy every time they had a piece to sing, the baritone of Jesus and Pilate's higher tones were sung from up on the balcony alongside the organist, adding to the drama, the organ only really coming in as accompaniment to their voices. Really enjoyed this, brilliant performance, brilliant setting.

 

Glasgow School of Art Degree Show 2012

If Monday is my day off work I like to avoid being at a loose end and doing any work related activity so try to run about and fill my day with any old tosh, so that's what I've done today, and there is still Euro 2012 games to come later - perfect.

River Kelvin, Glasgow

Collected along the riverside

The West End Festival is still on in this part of Glasgow so over the weekend we went for a burger, listened to some music and had a look around the stalls at the Friends of the River Kelvin Summer Gala. You know it is a "West End" festival when there are haloumi burgers on offer alongside the meat and my "Still Hate Thatcher" top got 4 or 5 "Hey, I like the t-shirt" comments. My favourite stall was the one by a guy who had been collecting rubbish that he'd found washed up along the banks of the river. I think initially he'd started off trying to help the efforts to clean up the riverside, but got a bit addicted to the junk collecting part of it. Anyway he has spent 8 years gathering a fine collection of clay pipes, golf balls, knife handles and apparently once came across a grenade.

Over the weekend the annual Glasgow School of Art Degree Show opened, and runs until June 16th. Other art school degree shows are available. The ongoing building work means that the Art School is scattered across various sites at present, so I got on my bike this Monday to try to take as much of it in as I could. I always enjoy seeing this when I get the chance, not really trying to spot the next Turner Prize winner, but more to wander around the buildings and say "You spent four years here and that's what you came up with?". To be honest the show this year seemed to have a bit more substance than it sometimes can, particularly some fine photography, sculpture, embroidered pieces and the Environmental Art pieces. John Lennon, Kurt Cobain - okay, maybe a bit less original. I liked the sculptures of feathers in Rosemary Shepley's stuff, and I knew that they were odd, but didn't realise that the new roadsigns that had appeared around Byres Road were actually the work of one of the students, Jo Gallagher, asking the question "but is it art?"

"Removed, reduced, repainted, replaced" - Jo Gallagher

Some plaster casts of fruit and a shower head

Hopped back on the bike, ignored the rain (although I did wish I'd brought gloves, bit nippy for June) and headed for The Glue Factory being used to house the Master of Fine Art works. Frustratingly too many of these involved video installations, which seemed to have a tendency to crash and display a 6 foot high computer error message (or was this what they'd spent their time producing?). Nosing around the disused industrial space here was as interesting as much of the work on display. Claire Moore's Russian themed paintings I liked, Erik Osberg's video was distracting enough as he chased himself about, but beyond that there wasn't much that grabbed me. The polythene wrapped works below reminded me of Karla Black's stuff which is still on show in GoMA just now.

Three pieces on display at the MFA show at the Glue Factory

Onwards to the Skypark building down on Finnieston Street where the Jewellery, Textiles, Interior Design and Product Design departments are displaying their wares. I'm afraid what I can remember most from here was the view out of the windows over to the Hydro Arena slowly taking shape beside the SECC. With a name like that it is going to look very silly when people find out that it is named after a sponsor and no swimming pool or flumes are planned.

Hydro Arena

My plan from there had been to get a wee vegan lunch and organic beer down at the excellent bar "The 78" but I was thwarted as they don't open until 12.30pm, so carrying on along Argyle Street I went into the Italian exhibition at Kelvingrove Art Gallery, "The Essence of Beauty: 500 years of Italian Art". It is not my favourite type of painting, overly religious for my taste. Also the exhibition basically displays Glasgow's civic collection of Italian paintings, ceramics and sculpture arranged chronologically but instead of it all being free at Kelvingrove and the Burrell Museums, you are charged £5. Unless you really like this stuff, I wouldn't bother. Before I left I ran upstairs to have another look at Richard Wright's works on paper again, and whilst up there Alison Watt's painting,

 

Phantom, by Alison Watt

Phantom caught my eye as several of the students whose work I'd seen earlier today have obviously been influenced by her work, but her skill just glows out from the canvas.

As I was now getting hungry it was an excuse to revisit A Play, A Pie and A Pint who are starting their season of "Sol Classic Cuts", classic plays adapted to the 45 minute lunchtime format that works so well for producing new drama at Oran Mor. This week it was Pygmalion by George Bernard Shaw, adapted by Sandy Nelson. I liked the symmetry of this being on as my children had seen the modern version of Eliza Doolittle performing with the Olympic Torch in George Square on Saturday. I've never been a fan of musicals, so haven't ever made it all the way through 'My Fair Lady' and neither have I seen Shaw's play that is to blame for its existence so the plot was all new to me. The typical tweeks to the story worked well, playing it with the actors' Scottish accents, as Higgins gets Eliza to enunciate "the whale in Crail has a very large tail". The central themes of class division and social mobility are sadly as relevant today as they were 100 years ago when the play was written. Anyway, if you plan to go, get there early to chose your seat as today was as busy as I've seen the place in a while.

At this point my plan had been to sit down to Ukraine vs Sweden, but as my son is in the school production of "The Wizard of Oz" this week, it seems that I DO get to watch a musical today. Oh, joy.

Play, a Pie and a Pint and Philip Glass

A Play, a Pie and a Pint

It's been a while since I managed to catch one of the lunchtime a Play, a Pie and a Pint shows at Oran Mor at the top of Byres Road, the small matter of work usually being my obstacle. Now that the football season is over though I tried to make an extra effort to grab a pie this week and took in "One Day In Spring", the last in a season of plays they've put on in association with the National Theatre of Scotland inspired by the popular revolts in the Arab world over the past 18 months. It had received rave reviews in The Herald and The Scotsman, a compilation piece of short sketches and ideas by several young Arabic playwrights directed by David Greig. Right from its inception I've liked the variety of stuff on show at a Play, a Pie and a Pint, sometimes its a bit hit or miss, sometimes there's a wee gem or "that guy off the telly" in an intimate venue. The two young actors telling these stories from the Arab world did it with humour, pathos, enthusiasm and energy, despite one of them acting from a wheelchair (which gets to double as a tank) after Seif Abdelfattah broke his ankle in rehearsals. Fellow Egyptian Sara Shaarawi is his partner on stage giving us "18 short lessons in how to run a revolution" and I liked the wee aside that "you'll never get your independence like that" when the Scottish audience gave a quiet and reluctant murmur when asked to participate in their revolt. It is jarring to watch these tales written by and about people involved in the unfolding actions, with vigour and humour and then be faced with gruesome scenes of brutal fighting in Syria in the news a day later.

If you've never tried it, give it a bash next time you are passing through the West End about lunchtime,. They start at 1pm, get in beforehand to pick up your pint (lager, Guinness, glass wine, orange juice, whatever), your pie (or quiche for you veggies, with or without gravy) take a seat and who knows what or who you'll see. Next week it's a play by Ron Butlin whose books Vivaldi and the Number 3 and The Sound of My Voice I've enjoyed. I might try to slope off early from work again next week.

Oran Mor pies don't come with a wee mouse, by the way

Minimalism

Glasgow Royal Concert Hall have been running an ongoing series of concerts loosely under the label of 'Minimal' and this weekend they were marking the 75th birthday of American composer Philip Glass by having the man himself in town to do a variety of performances. The one that I managed to catch was on Friday night where he performed his score to the classic early talkie "Dracula" starring Béla Lugosi. He was on the piano on stage alongside Michael Riesman, on keyboard and conducting and longstanding collaborators, the Kronos Quartet. It is years since I've seen Philip Glass perform, and looking at his recent credits writing film scores seems to have become a large part of it. It was also a treat to see the Kronos Quartet, however it took a wee bit of time for me to adjust my ear to listen to the music. As the film was playing out on the screen above them, the musicians were beavering away below it on stage. The melodrama on screen was absorbing and I guess ultimately, although I had bought a ticket to hear the music, it is written to create and augment the atmosphere of the film. This worked particularly well in the dramatic last 20 minutes. It made me think back to the skill of the musicians in the silent movie days who added their dramatic flourishes to the on screen action, such as my wife's great-auntie Peggy, who did it as her job. Although I met her as an old woman, it is funny to think of her in Philip Glass's place at the piano in the cinemas of Lochgelly instead of a concert hall in Glasgow. Anyway, I enjoyed seeing the film again, enjoyed hearing and seeing the musicians and I think even Philip Glass enjoyed himself as he forced out a smile on his third curtain call. Afterwards I met up with fellow Jags man @NiallKennedy who'd been at the concert too, which was a very civilised way to end the week, before walking through the streets of Glasgow at 11pm, in shirt sleeves, when a week ago I needed gloves and a bunnet. Just in case that is the Scottish summer over already, I've squeezed in 2 barbecues this week already. Perfect!

Great-auntie Peggy