Threats on all sides given the brush-off
we’re not. But in her imaginative one-woman show Miller tries to change our minds.
She’s the kind of person who chats to you in queues, she explains, and that everyone tries to avoid. Only that’s a mistake: she’s warm, amiable, funny and friendly, with her laid back double-denim and congenial approach. The audience discussion develops into a piece of storytelling, charting the history of Miller’s family as an alternative fairytale, focusing in particular on the women, using Russian dolls to help.
A pattern of mothers criticising their daughters, who in turn criticise their daughters emerges in a way that’s depressingly easy to identify with. Miller’s desire to break the chain with a more holistic kind of parenting is also well observed. But if ever you feel like you put too much pressure on yourself and others, the show’s final, thoughtful celebration of imperfection as representing freedom will help you to redress the balance. SALLY STOTT Scottish Storytelling Centre (Venue 30) JJJJJ She’s some woman, that Moira Bell. Queen of the Falkirk schemes, and alter ego of one of Scotland’s most gifted male novelists, she first emerged into the spotlight half a decade ago, sporting her trademark mix of generous spirit, sharp streetwise intelligence and a pure terrifying streak of violence, particularly when her nearest and dearest are threatened; and now, she returns in a near-perfect series of new monologues, both howlingly funny – as performed by the writer Alan Bissett – and unnervingly sharp and poetic, in their vision of where the Scottish working class might be at, in the summer of 2017.
This time around, Moira has become a granny; and as Bissett – helped by director Sacha Kyle – conjures up her inimitable presence with a tilt of the hip and a flick of a cigarette, it’s immediately clear that the experience of being a gran might have been designed to bring out the best and the worst in Moira, as she coos over the adored grand wean, blowing smoke straight into his face, and threatening to give all his future enemies a doing.
It’s not just the wee yin
0 Alan Bissett as his own comic creation, grandmother Moira Bell who absorbs Moira’s attention this time round, though; there’s a trip to the unknown land of Inverness for a rollercoaster reconciliation with her sister, a hilarious taboobusting train conversation with an Englishman about Scottish independence, and an encounter with her exman, while she’s trying to pursue her “wee cleaning job”, so spectacularly well performed that the air fairly smoulders with sexual tension and outright hilarity.
In the end, Moira takes a made his name, but his regular ping pong balls have been replaced by tennis balls. Typically, he’s brought far too many, so he has transformed them into a series of silly little characters, good for several minutes of solid belly laughs. He has also invested in a vibrating wobble board, a simple prop but one which evokes hilarity out of all proportion to its initial promise.
Then there’s the return of his looping machine, working up some of his naggingly catchy, nonsensical tunes, while winningly, and he is deploying an audio refrain of “Something’s Gone Wrong”, making manifest the risks he is taking and acknowledging the occasional set-pieces that fall flat on their face.
This time round though, there is also a discernible trip to the Kelpies, symbol of a new Falkirk, and encounters a moment of rare and soaring self-knowledge, in conversation with the inevitable urchin who tries to steal her bike; reminding us that while Moira makes us laugh till our ribs ache, her story is also in part a tragic one. As she might say herself, and as working-class Scots have been saying to each other for centuries, if ye didnae laugh, ye wid cry. JOYCE MCMILLAN narrative thread running throughout, concerning Jones’s struggle as a jobbing actor, which might end with an opportunity to screentest for Steven Spielberg’s new science-fiction blockbuster, in the lead role as a sentient robot. Imbuing his planning with a certain thespian dignity, he is still set up to fail though, as he reintroduces the wobble board and turns his physical preparation into a farce of grooming silliness.
Best of all perhaps, are further glimpses of the relationship he enjoys with his chipoff-the-old-block son, their recorded conversation about where babies come from spinning off into a bizarre tangent of Jones Jr’s imagination. JAY RICHARDSON