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23 September 2012 The Guardian
The Incredible Adventures of See Thru Sam
By Johnny McKnight. A Random Accomplice review
WE don't normally regard slipping into the background as an attribute, but 15-year-old Sam McTannan thinks being a wallflower is his greatest gift. He likes not being noticed, he enjoys escaping attention and is unsurprised when Violet Morgana, the girl of his dreams, still does not recognise him after three years of school together.
Double Nugget
By Johnny McKnight. A Random Accomplice theatre review
JOHNNY McKnight is a fly one. As a playwright, he makes like everything is a big laugh. The two one-hour plays brought together here by Random Accomplice are all gossipy and effervescent, quick-witted jokes and gallus patter with an air of camp. Like the candyfloss shared by Jenny and Leyla at the close of the first play, Mary Massacre, they appear bright, sugary and insubstantial.
Smalltown
By DC Jackson, Johnny McKnight and Douglas Maxwell. A Random Accomplice review.
IT will be remembered as the show with the masturbating fox sitting at the head of a bed with a masturbating stag. Yet this scene isn't some troubling piece of psychodrama from Anthony Neilson, but the culmination of a deliriously funny two-hander by DC Jackson. A kind of condensed version of A Midsummer Night's Dream, it is half bad-sex romp, half atavistic nightmare, and all hilarious.
18 February 2011 Northings
Smalltown
By DC Jackson, Johnny McKnight and Douglas Maxwell. A Random Accomplice review.
NOBODY would doubt the cultural significance of Northings, but even its most avid reader would be surprised by how much it has influenced the latest show by Glasgow's Random Accomplice. The premise of Smalltown, written in three sections by Douglas Maxwell, DC Jackson and Johnny McKnight, comes directly from a Northings review of McKnight's Little Johnny's Big Gay Musical. That review commented on the uncanny similarities between those three writers – all in their 30s, all from Ayrshire and all with a preoccupation with their teenage years – and speculated that there must have been something in the Ayrshire water supply to produce such a coincidence.
8 June 2010 The Guardian
Little Johnny's Big Gay Wedding
By Johnny McKnight. A Random Accomplice/National Theatre of Scotland review.
FOR a recap of the story of modern theatre, check out this daft and delightful mock wedding reception by Random Accomplice and the National Theatre of Scotland. It is a whirlpool collision of performance art, site-specific theatre, pantomime, camp, Broadway musical, sentimental drama, standup comedy and first-person confessional. There's even a line from Shakespeare.
Promises Promises
By Douglas Maxwell. A Random Accomplice review.
YOU could say this play was purpose-built for readers of this newspaper's Education and Society sections. Margaret Ann Brodie has just arrived as a supply teacher in a London school when she discovers a community group is about to perform an exorcism on one of her pupils, a six-year-old Somali girl who is an elective mute. The scene is set for a debate about classroom control and multiculturalism: should tolerance of beliefs extend to summoning devils before playtime?
9 February 2010 Northings
Promises Promises
By Douglas Maxwell. A Random Accomplice review.
TEACHING is all about living up to a promise. So said an old associate of Maggie Brodie, the supply teacher at the unsteady heart of this excellent one-woman play by Douglas Maxwell. The teacher promises to teach and her job is to fulfil that promise one short lesson at a time.
Little Johnny's Big Gay Musical
By Johnny McKnight. A Random Accomplice review.
DID someone put something in the Ayrshire water 30 years ago? How else to explain the glut of young playwrights from the area who all have a hang-up about their teenage years? First on the scene was Douglas Maxwell who, in plays such as Decky Does a Bronco, Our Bad Magnet and If Destroyed True, has returned repeatedly to his small town adolescence. Snapping at his heels is Daniel Jackson whose The Wall and The Ducky have added to the sub-genre of Ayrshire teen comedy.
Something Wicked
By the company. A Random Accomplice review.
ANYONE who's been to a funeral will know how hilarity hangs on the tail of tragedy. With every outpouring of emotion comes a repressed giggle, every attempt at decorum a scurrilous joke. To laugh in the face of adversity is a better survival strategy than buckling under the senselessness of it all.
theatreSCOTLAND © Mark Fisher 2009–2012
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