theatreSCOTLAND

26 October 2010 Unpublished

Blood and Roses

By Sandy Thomson. A Poorboy Theatre review.

IT is only when you are half way through Poorboy's rich and rewarding promenade performance that the pieces start falling into place. You are sitting alone in Café Cossachok, a Russian restaurant, sharing a table with a larger-than-life white doll with woolly red veins and prominent belly button, like the ghost of some distant relative in a faraway land. On your headphones, you are trying to keep track of several stories running in parallel, taking you back and forth from the siege of Leningrad to the 1960s Glasgow of Alex Harvey, from the 1980s of anti-Thatcher protest to the witch-burning of the 17th century.

5 February 2010 The Guardian

Birds and Other Things I Am Afraid Of

By Lynda Radley. A Poorboy/Arches Theatre review

A SITE-SPECIFIC show in a 19th-century church offers lots of tantalising possibilities: all those empty pews, echoing galleries and haunted corners. They are not, however, possibilities that concern Lynda Radley, whose one-woman show for Poorboy and the Arches takes place almost exclusively in a wooden shed constructed on the Lansdowne's altar.

22 March 2006 The Guardian

Falling

By Sandy Thomson. Poorboy review.

THOSE you'd most like to hear from are the drinkers in Waxy O'Connor's who break into a round of Let's All Do the Conga as 10 strangers walk hand in hand through their pub. Or the travellers on Buchanan Street underground who find themselves next to three dancers in devilish red fluttering on the platform to a Spanish guitar. Or the pedestrians walking down Midland Street as a gang of Asbo angels in white hoodies usher us into a blacked-out minibus.

21 Junes 2005 The Guardian

Bridgebuilders

By Sandy Thomson and Anna Stewart. Poorboy review.

ALL kinds of amazing things get washed up with the tide - and a lot of driftwood besides. It's a shame that Bridgebuilders, a site-specific promenade performance by Sandy Thomson and Anna Stewart, doesn't distinguish between the two. A deliberately fragmented collage of scenes on a theme of the sea, it has many valuable finds but just as many that you'd happily toss back into the water.

theatreSCOTLAND © Mark Fisher 2009–2010