Often brutal look at growing up gay in Scotland of the 80s
Maggie & Me
Tron Theatre, Glasgow
Neil Cooper
****
DON’T be fooled by the sucker punch breeziness of the Superman styled promo images that accompany the National Theatre of Scotland’s staging of Damian Barr’s 2013 memoir. While there are laughs to be had, Barr’s look back at growing up gay in small town 1980s Scotland can be a pretty brutal ride at times.
Brought to life by Barr, co-writer James Ley and director Suba Das, we first meet DB celebrating his new commission with his husband Mark. But how to go about unearthing his personal remembrance of things past without avoiding the traumas that shaped him? The only answer, as DB is advised, is to relive it all, however painful that may be.
This sends Barr on a trip that uses a similar sleight of hand to that used in TV fantasia, Ashes to Ashes, in which a retro kitsch setting is the backdrop for some very serious meditations on an era that had a lot more going on than its seeming revolt into style.
In designer Kenneth Macleod’s hands, Barr’s world looks like a Spitting Image version of Narnia, where Gary Lamont’s DB watches over his younger self. As played by Sam Angell, Wee DB runs a gauntlet of playground homophobia and a brutal home life, all seen through the Thatcherite prism of the former Conservative Prime Minister’s destruction of industry and sanctioning of prejudice. Over all this hangs the spectre of Maggie herself, with Beth Marshall channeling the spirit of the wicked witch of Westminster with arch ferocity.
All this is brought to life in a fearless and unflinching fashion in Das’ production, which takes its time to convey Barr’s storyline over its just shy of three-hour duration. As DB finally meets his deadline, the ghosts of his life are immortalised in print even as they have been laid to rest in a story that is as much about purging as liberation.
Music
Elijah: Sco/emelyanychev
City Halls, Glasgow
Keith Bruce
*****
FOR all his own talent as a conductor, and acknowledging the immediate and lasting popularity of his oratorio Elijah in its own era, it is very tempting to suggest that Felix Mendelssohn may never have heard a performance of the work quite as exquisite as this one.
Already acclaimed last summer at the BBC Proms, the Scottish Chamber Orchestra’s strategy of scheduling a reprise of that success as its 50th anniversary season finale was a fitting climax for its loyal, and clearly growing, audience. If the work had fallen from fashion, principal conductor Maxim Emelyanychev and the SCO players and excellent chorus remade the case for its Victorian place in the repertoire just behind Handel’s Messiah.
There is no doubt that that work – and Bach’s Passions – were in the composer’s mind. Elijah’s Part One aria Is not his word like a fire? and the mezzo-soprano one Woe unto them who forsake him! that follows it are unmistakeably Handelian, while that narrative structure of the work, with its stories of the worship of Baal and the revenge of Jezebel from the Old Testament, clearly recalls both composers. But if there was an early music sensibility to the conductor’s brisk tempi and in the instrumentation, playing and singing, there was also an awareness of the influence of opera on the work, and the fuller orchestration for an augmented SCO.
Perhaps the brass slightly overpowered the opening, pre-overture, utterance of Roderick Williams as Elijah, but beyond that Emelyanychev had the balance of everyone on stage in its precise place, his attention to every detail, vocally as well as instrumentally, a joy to watch.
Baritone Williams was as characterful as always in the title role, leading an absolutely stellar cast of expressive soloists, with tenor Thomas Walker, sopranos Carolyn Sampson and Rowan Pierce and mezzo Anna Stéphany. Pierce took up a place alongside the chorus in the choir balcony to sing the Youth in Part One, while the trio of women moved behind the orchestra for the unaccompanied setting of Psalm 121. With a choir soprano taking the later Seraphim solo, the acoustic of the City Halls was exploited to the full.
Crucially though, there is surely not another amateur orchestra chorus or choral society in the land that could have performed this piece as precisely as director Gregory Batsleer’s SCO singers did. With a 22-voice chamber choir in the front row performing the music specifically calibrated for “semichorus”, it saved its full might for the demonstration of divine power in Part Two. From the purity and ensemble of the tenors’ The harvest now is over at the beginning to the declamatory concluding Amen, this collective is on peerless form.
Music
Dunedin Consort
Glasgow University Memorial Chapel Keith Bruce
*****
TAKING its title from one of the newest works in the programme, Dunedin Consort’s Scattered Rhymes was an engrossing journey through the history of unaccompanied vocal music that ranged from the foundation texts of Palestrina and Victoria to the inspirations of a classic 1971 rock track and contemporary sustainable horticultural practice.
Associate Director and conductor Nicholas Mulroy, who devised the sequence of music, shared the information that composer Tarik O’regan had cited The Who’s Won’t Get Fooled Again as an influence on his three-movement suite almost as an aside. In performance, however, the tension between Pete Townshend’s repeating keyboard figure and his signature power chords was clearly replicated in the challenging music written for a quartet of the singers and that produced by the rest of the ensemble.
Scattered Rhymes is, as Mulroy said, a startlingly original composition, and there are precious few groups that would attempt it, far less pull it off in such impressive style.
What linked all the works through the centuries was the words they set: either Petrarch (O’regan, Gavin
Bryars, and early Flemish composer Adrian Willaert) or the equally sensual Biblical texts from Song of Songs, set by James Macmillan in the opening Behold, you are beautiful, my love, and by Canadian composer Stephanie Martin for the sparkling Rise up my love. The exception was Caroline Shaw’s Companion Planting, a brand new work commissioned by Dunedin Consort from America’s hottest name in contemporary composition. The richly-metaphorical poem she wrote herself has much in common with those earlier writers, but the music is unmistakably the voice of the woman who herself writes and performs with vocal group Roomful of Teeth.
Its repertoire was evident in the clever, sparing use of extended techniques within the work’s accessible melodic structure, like the gentle ululating by soprano Claire Evans. Shaw’s lyric is lovely in itself on the page and the way she shares it among the men and women of the choir, with the others supplying wordless counterpoint, was perfectly realised.
This edition of the chamber choir contained three singers, Caitlin Mackenzie, Evan Mcdonald and Isaac Tolley, recruited through the Dunedin’s Bridging the Gap project for young musicians at the start of their careers, were all here, essential and fully integrated members of the ensemble.
This collective is on peerless form