Leaving us with a serious sense of loss
◆ This is Memorial Device evokes the 1980s with heartbreaking intensity, writes Joyce Mcmilan
Tamam Shud is a show that is all style, built around the frailest fragment of a story
This Is Memorial Device
Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh
★★★★
Tamam Shud
Oran Mor, Glasgow
★★★
For those of us who lived through the 1980s, it’s almost shocking to realise how far that era now seems like ancient history. David Keenan’s 2017 cult novel This Is Memorial Device is set in Airdrie around 19835; and although Margaret Thatcher was in power, the place was also still populated by a mouthy generation of young people who had grown up in the unprecedentedly equal Britain of the 1970s, and saw no reason why they should not rebel in a cultural style deeply connected to all the best global cultural movements of the post-war era.
Hence the only slightly heightened fantasy Airdrie of Keenan’s novel, captured by writer and director Graham Eatough in his 2022 stage show – now back on tour – and brilliantly performed by Paul Higgins; and hence the imaginary indy band This Is Memorial Device, remembered here – 40 years on – by their passionate fan Ross Raymond, once a young aspiring music journalist who followed them around the west of Scotland.
What we learn about This Is Memorial Device – during Raymond’s 80-minute monologue – is of course strictly limited; we certainly don’t hear much of their imaginary music, and the four band members are represented on stage, in best surrealist style, by fragmented shop-window dummies vaguely dressed to match their characters.
Yet what Graham Eatough and his powerful team make of this material is a slowburning but cumulatively overwhelming evocation of a time and place when the economic and material power of towns like Airdrie was shrinking, but human consciousness was still expanding into the space created by the age of postwar peace and prosperity. “Because nothing seemed possible, everybody was doing everything”, says Higgins’s Raymond. And through a brilliant collage of intense language, live action, powerful movement, brilliantly fragmented design by Anna Orton, and haunting black-and-white video of Airdrie scenes and fictional interviews with fans and admirers, Graham Eatough’s company succeed in conjuring up an era with a humorous yet heart-breaking intensity; and in leaving us with a fierce sense of loss, that deserves further exploration.
If This Is Memorial Device is a multi-layered and content-packed piece of theatre built around an intensely naturalistic central performance, Thomas Jancis’s debut play for A Play, A Pie and A Pint is the exact opposite – a show that is all style, built around the frailest fragment of a story.
Tamam Shud is based on a real-life incident in 1948, when the apparently uninjured body of a man was discovered on the beach at Somerton, a suburb of Adelaide not far from the British experimental rocket range at Woomera, in South Australia.
Around this still unsolved mystery, Jancis and director Andre Agius weave a 55-minute film noir of a drama, in which an ageing British spy – played with slowmoving aplomb by Stephen Docherty – recalls his own complicity in the case, the femme fatale who seems to have been implicated in the man’s death, and a suitcase full of vital documents that went missing during the incident.
There’s a sense, throughout the show, of a medium that doesn’t quite fit the message; a trench-coated film noir performed by three actors on the tiny Oran Mor stage inevitably risks looking more like a slightly amateurish send-up than a serious thriller. Yet still, the story is a resonant one; and with staunch support from Amelia Isaac-jones and Adam Buksh, Stephen Docherty finally brings it all home, in a closing monologue slightly marred by over-emphatic background music, but still haunting enough to leave us with a profound sense of sadness, and of post-war lives deeply distorted by global forces far beyond any individual’s control.
This Is Memorial Device at the Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh, until 6 April, and the Lemon Tree, Aberdeen, 18-20 April. Tamam Shud at Oran Mor, Glasgow, until 6 April; and the Gaiety Theatre, Ayr, 18-20 April.