Dundee Rep Archives - North West End UK

2Nov

By Nazaret RaneaNo Comments

Scotland

1984 – Royal Lyceum, Edinburgh

I first read 1984 in a philosophy class at high school. Back then I remember thinking how dystopian it was, one of those books that the teacher chose to make you think about how easily things could go terribly wrong, but in a way that still felt removed from reality. This new adaptation by Chris Hannan, directed by Dominic Hill, makes an interesting choice by bringing Orwell himself into the story. The play opens with the writer in a tuberculosis hospital in Scotland, where conversations with his doctor offer a glimpse into the political experiences that helped shape the novel. Jack Tarlton plays both Orwell and Winston Smith, moving between the real man and the fictional character whose world is slowly falling apart. I found this framing particularly interesting because it gives the...

The Singer – Traverse Theatre

There is a lovely irony running through The Singer. This is a show fascinated by the importance of finding the flow in music, yet it is a production which repeatedly struggles to find its own. Perhaps that is entirely intentional. Life is messy. Creativity is messy. Relationships are certainly messy, and the relationship between Joe, a profoundly Deaf songwriter, and Andy, a musician whose own career has fallen apart, was never going to travel in a conveniently straight line. So perhaps the stops, starts and sudden changes of direction are part of Cora Bissett's design. But that raises another question. Is the mess what an audience actually wants, or do we still crave the simplicity of a story which knows where it is taking us? There is an enormous amount to admire here. J...

Sunset Song – Royal Lyceum Theatre

Dundee Rep in a major co-production with the Royal Lyceum Theatre bring a contemporary reworking of a piece of classic Scottish fiction for the next ten days, marking the end of an East coast tour through Dundee, Aberdeen and Inverness. It is not surprising that the tour has stayed in sight of the North Sea given that almost the entire dialogue is performed in the Doric language native to the North East coast of Scotland. A script that would have had my sadly departed Mother-In-Law, Isobel, chortling away and no doubt reminiscing on her Invergorden crofting roots. Much of the setting of Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s Sunset Song would have been familiar to Isobel; the chains that bind you to the land, to family and hardship. The tears, the toil, the unending bleakness and the stoic endurance...