Sex and God
By Linda McLean. A Magnetic North review.
IMAGINE a string quartet, but with actors instead of musicians. In place of a score, a set of overlapping monologues. As they riff on similar themes, they could be from a family of musical instruments, each with her own timbre and pitch, but each part of the ensemble. Phrases echo like a melody from one performer to another, sometimes dissonant, sometimes in harmony, taking on different meanings according to their setting.
9 March 2011 The Guardian
Wild Life
By Pamela Carter. A Magnetic North/Cumbernauld Theatre review.
WE'RE in the territory of Dennis Kelly's Orphans, a chic middle-class home, kitted out with hi-fi and Wi-Fi, with a sense that behind the venetian blinds is a lawless landscape of baying dogs, delinquent teenagers and rioting mobs. This is not a place professional couple Daisy and Dave care to visit after dark. They prefer to avoid direct engagement with real life by turning to home entertainment, pizza deliveries and their own brand of free association.
Wild Life
By Pamela Carter. A Magnetic North/Cumbernauld Theatre review.
IT IS billed as a play inspired by the story of the wolf-boy of Aveyron, a child who ran wild in the woods of southern France until his discovery in 1800. The unexpected twist of Pamela Carter's Wild Life, however, is that the wolf-boy makes no appearance – at least, not in three-dimensional form. Rather, in this production for Magnetic North, Carter imagines the effect such a feral creature could have on a modern-day couple who have banished all traces of wildness from their comfortable, middle-class lives.
After Mary Rose
By D Jones. Magnetic North review.
IT'S common for playwrights to take a fresh look at a classic, picking apart the period details to recapture the electricity of the original. But the world was not waiting for a new version of JM Barrie's Mary Rose - a largely forgotten piece of gothic fantasy driven by the author's preoccupation with ageing.
28 April 2009 The List
After Mary Rose
By D Jones. Magnetic North review.
IT'S credited to playwright D Jones, butAfter Mary Rose is primarily the work of JM Barrie. Collaborating with director Nicholas Bone of Magnetic North, Jones has given Barrie's 1920 ghost story Mary Rose a dust down so it has less of the creaky haunted house about it and more of the privations of war. But in structure and detail, she sticks closely to the original – so closely, in fact, it's odd for her to claim sole authorship at all.
28 April 2009 Northings
After Mary Rose
By D Jones. Magnetic North review.
THERE'S a poignant moment towards the end of Peter Pan when a grown-up Wendy realises she can never recapture the present-tense wonder of childhood. If Peter had the emotional depth to think about it, he too would mourn the way the real world gets old while he stays eternally young. It was a theme that obsessed playwright J M Barrie, both privately and professionally and, 16 years after Peter Pan, he was still exploring it in Mary Rose.
My Old Man
By Tom McGrath. Magnetic North review.
SAM MacRedie wakes up. He's in a hospital bed, with an oxygen mask strapped to his face and a doctor telling him he's had a stroke. He doesn't believe it. Surely he's still the same man who lived life to the max, a jazz-loving musician who'd worked the cruise ships, leaving women and children in his wake, heading off in reckless pursuit of heavy drugs and hedonistic pleasure.
28 September 2005 The Guardian
My Old Man
By Tom McGrath. Magnetic North review.
IN a month of album releases by Paul McCartney, 63, and the Rolling Stones, collective age 237, it is timely that the playwright Tom McGrath, 64, should redefine our idea of the elderly. If it were ever right to view the aged as kind-hearted relics of a more innocent time, the image of today's oldie has to be filtered through an era of drug busts, love-ins and counter-cultural insurgency.
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