Dolan brings his ageing political firebrand up to date
Theatre
attempts to come to terms, not just with the No vote, but with the pro Brexit result, the election of President Trump and the rise of hate crime that appears to have been spawned in tandem with both.
In this respect, Dolan’s sequel to his pre-referendum companion piece, The Pitiless Storm, is a kind of living newspaper that heaps iniquity after iniquity on to Bob and the strata of working class west of Scotland society he represents.
Dolan’s script is two-tiered in David Hayman Junior’s production for the FairPley company.
On the one hand, Bob is a Lear-like figure, briefly in exile from his own ideals while he takes stock of his own mortality as a principled survivor of the post-truth age. On the other, Bob’s affirmations as he rediscovers his faith in his own beliefs as much as the wider human spirit are dispatches from the frontline of the bar-room revolution.
Hayman flits briskly between gallus bravura, lingering pathos and a fierce commitment to something better as Bob tries to make sense of the mess most of us have had thrust upon us by the darkest of powers imaginable. Mary Brennan WE ARE in Partick. Perhaps for no other reason than it allows the title to wink at the 1972 film, Last Tango in Paris.
Actually, we’re in the realms of mid-life crisis, a perennially favourite terrain for writers to explore.
Here it’s housewife Moira (Mairi Morrison) who is fed up and looking to bring some fun back into her life, since bringing fun back into her marriage with Iain (David Walker) is a forlorn hope.
He won’t dance, she’s asked him – he pleads back pain, she reckons it’s selfindulgent laziness. Hell mend him: she decides to learn tango anyway.
Guess what happens next? Yes, bored middleaged woman meets younger dance teacher (Iain Beggs) and takes steps towards self discovery in a plot with less meat than a bite of the pie that shares top billing with the pint and play at Oran Mor.
Plot is not the main driving factor behind this production: language is. Alison Laing’s short Gaelic script was chosen following an open submission process which was judged by PPP and partners National Theatre of Scotland, MG Alba, BBC Alba and Bòrd na Gàidhlig. You can easily understand the appeal of a modern scenario to a panel interested in broadening out the public’s perception of Gaelic but little about this piece comes across as more than a half-hearted translation of familiar “marriage on the rocks” tropes.
Especially since – along with the English subtitles – the dialogue lapses into English as well, lending an awful irony to the comment by Moira’s husband that the Gaelic you hear at the Mod is “just for show”. The language that does come across well is that of tango, where compliant limbs can murmur of passion without recourse to words. Sponsored by Heineken