It’s been a long time since we saw the black doors of Glasgow’s Tron theatre swing open. A long time, too, since we caught sight of its artistic director, Andy Arnold, who emerges from theatrical gloom in this exquisite 30-minute film to lead us through the building’s shut-off corridors and back rooms.
He’s wearing a dishevelled dinner jacket and bowler hat – shades of Waiting for Godot and that era when everyone dressed for the theatre. He smiles in welcome but our visit feels illicit.
There’s a lot to take in, not least because he’s talking in riddles. “Pomander … Open pomander … Open poem and her … Open poem and him …”
Playful and surreal, these are the words of Pomander, an early concrete poem by the late, great Edwin Morgan, whose work, in all its vigour and variety, is celebrated here in Daryl Cockburn’s beguiling film.
In stairwell, kitchen and dressing room, we alight upon a series of characters, each preoccupied and alone. Sensuous and alarming, Jocelyn LoSole does an emotional striptease to a crackly voiceover of Morgan’s The Death of Marilyn Monroe, her flesh scrawled with words of abuse: Marilyn as the original mass-media victim.
Upstairs, Joe Proctor is equally chilling in Stobhill – The Porter, an extract from a painful poem about a late abortion. Behind a counter, Gerry Mulgrew returns to Morgan’s Cyrano de Bergerac, the landmark Scots adaptation he directed in 1992, this time playing a jolly baker awaiting the arrival of the long-nosed hero.
Elsewhere, we find actors, monsters and archivists in scenes designed by Ruth Darling that, undaunted by the medium of film, are rich in detail and brimming with theatricality. It’s a gorgeous achievement you’ll want to watch repeatedly.
High Man Pen Meander is available online until 13 December.
