Purposeful pottering
0 Crawford Logan plays Frank, painting a portrait of a lonely, bereaved but pragmatic man Gardener’s Year, helped into life by dramaturg Lynda Radley for Cumbernauld Theatre, turns us all into residents of an old people’s home. In nurse’s uniform, Nicola Roy is all efficient friendliness and sharp backchat as she asks after our ailments and settles us into the common room where Crawford Logan’s Frank is going to deliver a speech to the inaugural meeting of the gardening club.
In his corduroy trousers and tie, he has just the right mix of a retired teacher’s genial good manners and oldschool pomposity. His talk, a blend of gardening anecdotes and tangential meanders, has the overwritten quality that typifies a man a little too in love with his own voice, drifting into purple passages balance and potentially phallic intent. It seems to go on for ever. Watching her lipsync to an entire song later is no more riveting.
Yet, there are points when she spreads an idea so thinly that it seems to push through into new territory, a live art equivalent of one of those Stewart Lee routines designed to test the audience. The longer her vocal distortions and repetitions go on, the more purposeful they wherever a horticultural metaphor comes into view.
Capek is not immune to metaphors either, and, in the passing of the seasons and the process of nurturing a garden, he finds a parallel with the transitions of human life.
Slowly and subtly, in between tea breaks and medicine-taking, it becomes a touching portrait of bereavement, a lonely man’s resigned, pragmatic but no less heartfelt experience of losing a wife. It feels fragile and intimate, and made all the more special for a minor coup de theatre, thanks to designer Ed Robson, before we leave. MARK FISHER become. Sometimes, anyway. All this is in the cause of “deconstructing gendered linguistic histories” in relation to pop music, with the feminist theory of Kathy Acker as her guide.
Worthy – but, having deconstructed them, Croft doesn’t make clear what she’s putting in their place. It would seem less exclusive if she let the audience in on her thinking. MARK FISHER