Salutary tale told in striking form

WHEN the world is saturated with adaptations of Bram Stoker’s 19th century Gothic novel Dracula, how do you create something new? The answer, choreographer and director Mark Bruce discovered, is to go back to the source. Not just the original book, but the atmosphere and moral codes of the time.

Capturing the Victorian zeitgeist is just one reason Bruce’s Dracula is so successful. With that foundation in place, he and the design team have built a production that works on every level, from the staging to the choreography to the storytelling.

Dancer Jonathan Goddard sets the scene as the eponymous Count, dancing alone in a hazy light and drawing us into his world. From there we meet the rest of the characters (Van Helsing absent but not missed), all of whom are three dimensional and help drive the story along.

What strikes you most is the team effort. Bruce’s name is above the door, but the talent and effort of all concerned is readily apparent. An ornate gate, used to depict the castle, is put to a number of dramatic uses; a ship is eerily created by an effectively simple wheel; and Jonathan Harker’s journey to Dracula’s home is an ingenious use of horse masks on dancers pulling a carriage.

Despite the vast number of scene changes, the narrative remains clear throughout – regardless of whether you know Stoker’s novel or not. Add to that Bruce’s enjoyable movement and atmospheric musical choices, and you can see why this show has been a hit everywhere it’s played. KELLY APTER

l Run ends today MUSIC KATY B ABC, GLASGOW HHHH ON THE face of it Katy B (her full name is Kathleen Brien, which is a far less useful handle for splashing across her stage backdrop in 30-foot high letters) is yet another well-schooled, earnest but cynical attempt at fashioning a pop star via pedigree rather than passion.

Yet Katy combines both: born in Peckham and educated at the BRIT School and Goldsmiths, her career has been guided not by a major label looking to mould the new Jessie J or Paloma Faith, but by hugely successful underground London radio station Rinse, the home of dubstep.

So she’s crossover success and sound of the streets all at once. For all its flash and glitter, there’s also something endearingly unstaged about her show, as if she’s captured the essence THEATRE COLQUHOUN & MACBRYDE TRON, GLASGOW HHHH THEY appeared, they soared, they crashed, they burned, they died in poverty and obscurity. There is, in other words, a perfect dramatic arc to the story of Robert Colquhoun and Robert MacBryde, the two mid20th century Scottish artists who came out of Kilmarnock in the late 1930s, formed an inseparable personal and artistic partnership in the days when homosexuality was still illegal, soared to a rare moment of fame and acclaim in wartime London, and then faded away in a haze of alcoholic squalor.

And it’s a narrative captured with terrific wit, flair and creative fire in John Byrne’s 80-minute two-handed play about the two Roberts, first seen at the Royal Court in 1992, and now revived in the Tron’s Changing House as part of this year’s Glasgay! festival.

The story, of, course, is of a community hall rave and transmitted it to a stage filled with a forest of neon tubes and energetic synchronised dancers.

Katy herself is eager but natural, her flowing red hair tumbling over a simple lacy black dress, and she seems to genuinely revel in some of the more vigorous dancing to a backing which is part dubstep, part EDM, but all filled with precision melodies and great pop hooks.

Aside from a fallow passage of sadly obligatory balladeering tracks towards the middle of the set ( Crying For No Reason is a heart-clutching stand-out here), her music is rough-edged and compelling, from the clubby bounce of Hot Like Fire, 5AM and a snippet of Baby D’s Let Me Be Your Fantasy to the deep, focused groove of Katy On a Mission and the effervescent club grind of Perfect Stranger and Lights On. DAVID POLLOCK HIS MAJESTY’S THEATRE, ABERDEEN HHHH DANCE MARK MORRIS DANCE GROUP DOES Mark Morris create the visual embodiment of our secret wish to move whenever we hear music, the extension of the discrete toe-tap? Is he using our eyes to give us new ears for music? Whatever the trick, it’s close to magic.

Having been greatly missed in Scotland over recent years, the Mark Morris Dance Group’s only UK appearance on their current tour was at Aberdeen’s DanceLive festival this week. not a pretty one, and there are moments where it has to deal head-on with the determination of MacBryde, in particular, to become the very stereotype of the drunken alcoholic Scot in London, wandering the streets and pubs in a kilt, baring his bum, vomiting freely, and at one point inviting us all to join him in a chorus of A Wee Doch An Doris.

Yet the sheer unstoppable wit and energy of Byrne’s dialogue, and its fierce cultural sophistication in navigating the world of visual art, might have been made to capture the huge positive passion and radical anger that drove the early career of these two brilliant painters and to summon up the sheer, eternal fun of their glorious big adventure in the world of Mayfair galleries and Picture Post cover-portraits, as well as their proud, complex and tortured relationship with their own Scottish – or “Celtic” – identity.

Andy Arnold’s tiny gem of It proved one of those events that leaves the audience feeling privileged to have witnessed a great choreographer’s work.

Morris is renowned for his deep musical understanding, and the dancers demonstrated that this instinct remains as sharp as the keenest blade, with each piece creating an interpretation of music that was powerful, subtle and entrancing. Who knew a dance set to Bach’s Italian Concerto (with pianist Yegor Shevtsov) could shimmer with such joy and grace?

Alternatively, The Wooden Tree illustrated Ivor Cutler’s surreal voice and quirky tunes, relishing Cutler’s unique vision with wit, delightful cheek and earthy humour.

The most recently created piece, Words, cleverly explores Mendelssohn’s Songs Without Words. Violinist Georgy Valtchev joined Shevtsov for this work, resulting in a treasure.

Jenn and Spencer is a powerfully elegant, looselimbed duet set to Henry Cowell’s music, beautifully performed by Jenn Weddel a studio production pulls no punches in portraying the rise and fall of this talented pair; its conclusion is memorably bleak, a searing image of selfdestructiveness carried to its very limit.

Yet in Andy Clark (as Colquhoun) and Stephen Clyde (as MacBryde) it has found two actors who give themselves to this fierce, tragic and hilarious short play with a terrific combination of passion, humour, intelligence and sheer theatrical skill.

And they leave us with the feeling of having glimpsed something fundamental to Scotland’s recent inner history – the brilliance, the creative power, the backbeat of dangerous self-contempt and the constant need to define ourselves through or against the great cultural capital to the south, where so many Scots prosper, and some come so spectacularly to grief. JOYCE MCMILLAN

l Until 8 November and Brandon Randolph. Finally Polka, with music by Lou Harrison,rounded off the occasion in strident, magnificent style.

Morris’s creativity springs from our human urge to move to music, and the result transports the mind. Aberdeen struck lucky. JANE ROBINSON ORAN MOR, GLASGOW HHH THEATRE FLYING WITH SWANS PLAYS about the end of life are becoming something of an obsession in Scottish theatre, not least each October, during the Luminate Festival of creative ageing; and Jack Dickson’s new Play, Pie and Pint drama, due at the Traverse next week, is no exception. Yet while many plays on this subject take a dim view of our declining years, I can’t recall seeing one before which robustly suggests group suicide as the most creative option.

As the play opens, 70-something friends Jean and Dolly are on the pier at Ardrossan, waiting to board the Arran ferry; absent, so far, is their other friend Mona, now resident in a care home called Campsie View. Dolly is a brisk former advocate who spends her retirement travelling; Jean does not enjoy living under the supervision of her overweening daughter. And Mona, when she arrives, is clad only in her nightie, having had to steal a careworker’s car to make her escape. On the ferry, the three talk about their lives: their theme is autonomy, and the right to decide for themselves, even if that only means chucking their phones overboard, before taking the same leap themselves.

In Alison Peebles’ production, Kay Gallie, Anne Kidd and Karen Ramsay turn in a trio of well-crafted if slightly familiar performances, as three very different women at the ends of their tethers. Yet either we value the lives of the old, or we don’t; and if festivals like Luminate are about anything, they must surely be about challenging, rather than reaffirming, the increasingly chilling drumbeat of the idea that for people over 70, the right to die is the one that counts, and the only freedom worth having. JOYCE MCMILLAN l Oran Mor, Glasgow, today; Traverse, Edinburgh, 4-8 November FILM ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK TREASURE HUNT VARIOUS LOCATIONS, GLASGOW HHHHH IT’S doubtful if any of the other events in the British Film Institute’s ongoing Days of Fear and Wonder nationwide sci-fi season will prove quite as much fun as Glasgow’s Escape from New York Treasure Hunt.

Conceived and organised by Glasgow Film Festival, the soldout event featured 25 teams of hardcore fans (or the indulgent friends and family of hardcore fans) taking to rain-lashed streets in search of a pop-up screening of John Carpenter’s 1981 B-movie classic.

With the film starring Kurt Russell as eye-patch-wearing bad-ass Snake Plissken, the treasure hunt was built around plot points and locations related to the movie, all navigable via a specially designed downloadable app filled with clips from the film, factoids about Glasgow’s shared history with New York, and, of course, challenges to complete and puzzles to solve.