theatreSCOTLAND

Sean Hay and Mark Howie in Huxley's Lab, pic: Douglas Jones

8 April 2010 The Guardian

Huxley's Lab

By Ben Harrison. A Grid Iron/Lung Ha's review.

IT is nearly 80 years since Aldous Huxley published Brave New World, and around 60 since eugenics was discredited, so this site-specific collaboration between Grid Iron and Lung Ha's theatre company might easily have seemed old hat. Set in a clinic where test-tube babies are fed alcohol to determine their social status, Huxley's Lab is a dystopian vision of a culture hell-bent on perfection. Yet rather than treading familiar ground, the production by Ben Harrison and Maria Oller is fresh, funny and polemical.

1 May 2008 The Guardian

Yarn

Devised by the company. Grid Iron review.

EDINBURGH site-specific company Grid Iron specialises in after-hours trips into half-familiar spaces - airports, department stores, play parks - always immersing the audience in a world somewhere between reality and make-believe. Each location brings its own costumes, but nowhere has the idea of dressing up been so much to the fore than here in Verdant Works, a jute museum built in a former cloth factory. Working with Dundee Rep, the company interpret the idea of textiles in two ways. One is as storytellers, spinning a line, telling a yarn. A thread of red cotton marks our journey through four spaces, while a metaphorical thread sews together the patchwork of monologues, anecdotes and sketches performed by the six-strong company.

30 October 2007

Scottish theatre

IN the spring of 2006, Scotland's Grid Iron theatre company staged a site-specific show called Roam in Edinburgh International Airport. The audience arrived by bus, passports in hand, and were ushered towards the check-in desks. Instead of flight arrivals, they saw images of exotic destinations on the monitors. Instead of a tedious wait in departures, they watched a row of air hostesses, with matching blonde bobs and lurid turquoise outfits, performing a line-dance to a soundtrack of groovy 60s jazz.

27 May 2007 Scotland on Sunday

Once upon a Dragon

By Pauline Mol and Moniek Merkx. Grid Iron review.

Roam by Grid Iron at Edinburgh Airport Pic: Richard Campbell

15 April 2006 Variety

Roam

Grid Iron review.

AT a time when a pair of nail clippers on a short-haul flight can set alarm bells ringing, it will be interesting to see if Edinburgh Intl. Airport remains the only such venue with the boldness of vision to host Grid Iron's remarkable "Roam." Performed as the last airplanes of the evening are arriving on the runway, lead writer-director Ben Harrison's site-specific show takes over four airport check-in desks, several TV monitors, a baggage carousel and a section of the lounge to create a funny and polemical impressionistic collage of a population taking to the skies.

14 April The Sunday Times

Roam

Grid Iron review.

THE baggage you deposit at airports is all physical. They want your suitcases, holdalls and rucksacks. But to every check-in desk you also bring emotional baggage: memories of those you’ve left behind, anxieties about your journey ahead and fears for your sense of self in the big wide world.

13 May 2004 The Guardian

Fierce

By Justin Young. Grid Iron review.

ROCK musicals have had such bad press that the publicity for this show by maverick Edinburgh company Grid Iron tones down the music. Yet Justin Young's play with a score by Philip Pinksy is virtually through-composed. Fierce focuses on urban alienated teenage life, telling the story of Finlay, a 14-year-old boy from an Edinburgh housing scheme who is only released from his attention deficit disorder when daubing graffiti on buses, trains and buildings. Mark Arends plays him as a twitchy misfit, well meaning but easily led, living amid a grim youth culture of violence and intimidation. His one talent is both his saviour and his undoing, daubing his tag, "Fierce", as he keeps one step ahead of the police and a rival gang.

May 2004 Hi-Arts

Fierce

By Justin Young. Grid Iron review.

WHEN they build musicals on Broadway, they spend longer in previews than the average Scottish production stays on stage. The New York approach is vigorous and unsentimental: a song might be great, but if it doesn’t help the show, it’s thrown out and a new one written to replace it. No such business-like luxuries here, where the money simply isn’t available to develop a show at such a careful pace.

12 August 2003 The Independent

Those Eyes That Mouth

Grid Iron review.

IF all Edinburgh's Grid Iron company did was to find odd performance spaces, you could write its work off as a gimmick. But that's not the case. For a gothic thriller it found a supposedly haunted cellar; for a teenage drama, a playground; and now, for a play about memories and loneliness, it's found a deserted town house.

theatreSCOTLAND © Mark Fisher 2009–2010