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In an Alien Landscape
By Danny Start. A Birds of Paradise review.
HALF an hour along the Clyde from Glasgow, the Beacon is a handsome new arts centre with a 500-seat main auditorium and a 100-seat studio. The artistic director of the £9.5m waterfront complex is Julie Ellen who, by a happy accident, is also the director of this opening production by the touring company Birds of Paradise. With its all-white set by Kenny Miller and abstract video projections by Neil Bettles, it shows off the studio to good effect.Unfortunately, Danny Start's script is rarely as interesting as the story that inspired it.
Mother Courage and Her Children
By Bertolt Brecht. A Birds of Paradise review.
TAKING on Bertolt Brecht's epic play about one woman's ruthless survival during the 30 Years' War is not something you want to do lightly. As with much of the radical German playwright's work, it is a long, dialectical drama, built out of episodic scenes that resist an audience's desire for sentimentality and happy endings, even as it provides them with songs and moments of black comedy. Politically and theatrically, it is a big beast to tackle.
Clutter Keeps Company
By Davey Anderson. A Birds of Paradise review.
THIS is the second play on the trot in which writer Davey Anderson has used storytelling as his key technique. Like his spirited version of the adventures of Zorro at Edinburgh's Traverse Theatre before Christmas, Clutter Keeps Company requires the actors to slip in and out of character and take turns as a narrator.
9 October 2007 Northings
Beneath You: Spider Girls are Everywhere
By Kathy McKean. A Birds of Paradise review.
IT takes a good story to turn a good idea into a good play. That's why Kathy McKean's ‘Beneath You’ never gets going. Her promising theme about the pressure on young women to share in the consumerist dream is merely that – a theme – and one that lacks a decent tale to make it dramatic.
theatreSCOTLAND © Mark Fisher 2009–2013
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