Questions of long division
four-year making of First Snow/première Neige, a National Theatre of Scotland co-production with two Montreal companies, now receiving its world premiere at the Canada Hub. Co-written by Philippe Ducros and Scottish playwrights Davey Anderson and Linda Mclean, the play emerges as an elegantly surreal and heightened domestic drama, in which a Quebecois woman who voted “yes” in Quebec’s last independence referendum of 1995 – played with terrific force and glamour by Isabelle Vincent – invites her farflung children, brother and best friend back to the family home, to decide what to do with it.
The family can agree about nothing, with Harry Standjovski’s wonderfully dislikable Harry – Isabelle’s conservative brother – even making a racist remark to his niece’s black boyfriend. The seven people on stage are not just fictional characters, though; they are also the actors playing the parts, the real people whose names they carry, and who have themselves lived through their small nations’ cycles of hope or fear, despair or relief, faced with the idea of independence
On Karen Tennant’s beautiful open set, with a fine, meditative soundscape by Nick Sagar, the idea of the need for political hope is viewed from many angles, and uncomfortable questions raised about whether the people of Quebec and Scotland are really in a position to understand what oppression means.
And if no conclusion is drawn, in this rich and tentative conversation about how to survive political division and move on, a sense unfolds among director Patrice Dubois’s seven fine actors that in hearing and understanding one another as we have been doing since the 1980s, these two nations separated by 3,000 miles of ocean may still be able to play a powerful part in keeping one another on track. JOYCE MCMILLAN
0 First Snow/première Neige is a National Theatre of Scotland co-production with two Montreal companies
extremely funny insights into girl bands and Jamie Oliver. JAY RICHARDSON
Until 26 August. Today 10:30pm.
“Happy hour,” snorts Matt Rees midway through his show, “at the moment it’s neither”. And he’s not wrong, with his debut barely scraping to 40 minutes. Once a fixture in new act competition finals, his career was arrested by alcoholism.
And he’s clearly still feeling his way back. The Welshman’s droll, low-energy delivery didn’t engage the audience this afternoon. And, seemingly short of confidence, he couldn’t summon the wherewithal to sell many of his better lines, some of which would kill nearly a decade ago. There are some appealing stories here, with some smart twists that often didn’t receive their due.
But Rees’ lack of development from a highly promising student comic is apparent in the frequency of his routines about pornography. Not a bad thing in itself, but hardly endearing him to the visibly uncomfortable in the crowd. Candid about his travails, he at least has plenty of examples of drunken misadventure to mine.
Despite claiming to have never hit rock bottom, comedically, his occasional stumbles over a punchline and miscalibrated timing can, hopefully, only sharpen up over the run.
JAY RICHARDSON
Until 26 August. Today 4:45pm.