Stage Fright
Suspect Culture review.
IT is a terrific testament to the boundary-defying career of Suspect Culture that the Glasgow theatre company's final show before the Scottish Arts Council's axe falls should be an exhibition, not a play. Since its beginnings in the early 1990s, the company has questioned what theatre could be, upturning narrative conventions, putting musicians centre-stage and performing in unfamiliar tongues.
Static
By Dan Rebellato. Suspect Culture review.
YOU don't expect a play about pop music to be performed in sign language. It's easy to assume people with hearing impairments have nothing to do with the world of sound. But from the off in this play by Dan Rebellato we find the deaf actor Steven Webb teasing us with his arcane knowledge of Johnny Cash and Hall and Oates.
26 February 2008 Variety
Static
By Dan Rebellato. Suspect Culture review.
IT speaks volumes about Suspect Culture and Graeae Theater that their first collaboration should be a show about pop music: One of the actors in Dan Rebellato's "Static" is deaf and the entire production is staged in both sign language and speech. But even though "Static" questions our prejudices about the appreciation of music by the hard of hearing, Rebellato's play rarely rises above the level of soap opera, stretching neither the actors nor the audience nearly as far as the radical concept merits.
Futurology: A Global Revue
By the company. Suspect Culture review.
IT is the 14th UN Conference of the Future, and the subject is climate change. The delegates have gathered at their Perspex desks to hammer out a Kyoto-style agreement, but they seem more interested in national rivalries, free-market enterprise and post-conference sex than saving the planet. Only the poor woman from a sinking Pacific island 465 miles south of Fiji has any sense of urgency, and she is as powerless as the rioting mob on the streets outside the meeting room.
12 April 2007 Variety
Futurology: A Global Revue
By the company. Suspect Culture review.
IN a remarkable fusion of conference etiquette and cabaret flamboyance, Scottish company Suspect Culture has taken the temperature of our globally warmed-up times and produced a theatrical hybrid that's as entertaining as it is politically ambivalent. Lying somewhere between satire and surrealism, "Futurology: A Global Revue" paints a wry and witty picture of a generation caught in the headlights of an apocalyptic juggernaut. But while its refusal to commit itself to any route out of our impending eco-nightmare is deliberate, it also feels like an evasion.
11 September 2006 The Guardian
Killing Time
By Graham Eatough and Graham Fagen
THERE'S a striking moment when you step into the second room of this playful collaboration between artist Graham Fagen and theatre director Graham Eatough of Suspect Culture. You have just been watching a series of video projections in which actor Paul Thomas Hickey steps in and out of the sets of classic plays, bringing some momentary activity into the inert lives of the characters he finds. Each video recalls a famous play - Look Back in Anger, The Dumb Waiter, Waiting For Godot and The Cherry Orchard - and Hickey passes from one to the other in a cleverly timed journey around the room.
The Escapologist
By Simon Bent. Suspect Culture review.
FINEST entrance of the year is made by Paul Blair in The Escapologist. Suspended by his feet, he edges down to the stage head-first from the high Tramway ceiling, dressed in a straitjacket. Wriggling free, he dusts himself down and takes his place on a therapist's couch.
29 January 2006 Variety
The Escapologist
By Simon Bent. Suspect Culture review.
MOST plays focus on the conflict sparked when different psychological states collide. "The Escapologist" does it the other way around. In his first collaboration with Scottish company Suspect Culture, English writer Simon Bent focuses on his character's psychological states and puts the conflict aside. What his elliptical approach loses in dramatic tension in this cool and quietly fascinating show, it gains in behavioral analysis.
A Different Language
By Renato Gabrielli. Suspect Culture review.
YOU get a happy sense of being fluent in Italian in Renato Gabrielli's new play for Suspect Culture, which celebrates its 10th anniversary with A Different Language. Rather like Miles Kington's Let's Parlez Franglais, it gives you just enough of two languages to create the illusion of getting by in both. When it plays to an Italian audience in Trieste next month, the laughs will be as loud, but they'll come in slightly different places.
1 March 2005 Northings
A Different Language
By Renato Gabrielli. Suspect Culture review.
IF every lonely heart was as true as their word, you wouldn’t be able to move in the countryside for all the hill-walkers. It’d be standing-room only in every cinema and they’d be queuing round the block for the theatre. The stuff we write in the small ads is less the truth about ourselves than a projection of the people we’d like to be – keen hill-walkers and enthusiastic arts lovers, a little bit younger, slimmer and more sexy than we actually are.
8000m
By David Greig. Suspect Culture review.
IN Touching the Void, the documentary film about a near-fatal attempt on Siula Grande in the Peruvian Andes, one of the climbers describes his job as a cross between ballet and gymnastics. Such romantic thinking in the face of insane odds helps explain the popularity of high-altitude climbing. It's about grace and athleticism in the presence of the natural drama of the landscape.
theatreSCOTLAND © Mark Fisher 2009
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