theatreSCOTLAND

6 October 2009 The Guardian

An Argument about Sex

By Pamela Carter. An Untitled Projects review.

YOU would imagine the extraordinary moment in this new play by Pamela Carter – a response to Marivaux's La Dispute – would be when the audience are moved from one theatre space, with its dowdy office set, to an adjacent space of Astroturf and stadium lights. Here we watch the results of an experiment in which four teenagers brought up in isolation meet and fall in love for the first time. But the scene is laboured and predictable – an arch series of encounters going from sexual awakening to infidelity, underscoring the idea that behaviour is pre-conditioned.

24 July 2006 The Guardian

Slope

By Pamela Carter. An Untitled review.

THE low point comes when Arthur Rimbaud wipes his arse on a page torn from a copy of Madame Bovary and returns the soiled paper to the book. The high point - literally - is the audience, perched above a fully functioning bathroom in which Rimbaud and his poet lover, Paul Verlaine, play out an affair that goes from hedonistic naughtiness to erotic obsession and dissolute despair.

theatreSCOTLAND © Mark Fisher 2009