Nocturne Traverse
Architecting Traverse
Lucky You Assembly @ Assembly Hall
Vincent Assembly @ George Street
Stefan Golaszewski Speaks About A Girl He Once Loved Pleasance Courtyard
The Time Step Pleasance Courtyard
Global Warming is Gay C venues
A terrible chill runs down the spine of Adam Rapp's Nocturne, a riveting one-man play that has transferred to the Traverse from the Almeida, where it had its UK premiere last month. 'Fifteen years ago I killed my sister,' is the first thing the 32-year-old narrator, played by Peter McDonald, tells us after he removes a chair from a meat hook and sets it down on the bare stage. He immediately deconstructs these words, then fleshes them out, describing how an unhappy childhood in a dead-end Illinois town ended in tragedy and a family's disintegration.
Flashes of grim humour riddle the play like light through bullet holes. Riding in the Buick Electra that shuttles the young narrator towards disaster is 'like lounging. There's this sense that platters of food will be served.' A garden gnome 'looks as if he's suffering from some sort of gastro-intestinal disorder'. But mostly there's the chill, which comes out in the hard, glacial precision of Rapp's language, and which finds its musical complement in Grieg's Nocturne, the origin of the play's title.
McDonald deploys Rapp's words with equal precision, his face torn, in the moments of parental confrontation, between expressions
of anguish, pity and disgust. It's a terrific performance in a supremely controlled piece of work.
Architecting, also at the Traverse, is a free-flowing, time- and space-collapsing, chaos-embracing affair that does an awful lot with a camera, plywood and bits of string. The play, developed by New York company Team, tackles loss and dislocation in the American south and explores parallels between the Reconstruction era of the 1860s and 70s and the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Historical figures such as Henry Adams and Margaret Mitchell pop up alongside present-day characters, including a young architect leading a sanitised redevelopment scheme in New Orleans.
Too much of the action is spent on the problematic racial content of Mitchell's Gone With the Wind, and the play is cluttered at times, but the questions that arise are thought-provoking. The six actors, playing many more than six characters, are a blur of costume changes but they somehow find time to be funny and engaging. On the evidence of these two works, and what looks like a promising programme for the rest of the festival, the Traverse's new artistic director Dominic Hill is off to a strong start.
A diametrically opposing view of the American south is provided by Lucky You, a riotous comedy that leaves integrity and dignity mangled by the roadside. It's based on a novel by Carl Hiaasen, the best-selling crime writer whose favoured backdrop is Florida and whose characters make Elmore Leonard lowlifes look like a bunch of Classics professors. The MacGuffin here is a winning lottery ticket, the property of one JoLayne Lucks, a beacon of decency amid a swarm of crooks, scam artists and frauds. On her trail are two disenfranchised rednecks who have unwittingly named their white power movement after a rap group. Again, a handful of actors sustain a vast, motley dramatis personae. The staging is imaginative and the one-liners are razor-sharp, but the play flags in the last quarter-hour.
Leonard Nimoy has spent much of his life insisting that he and Star Trek's Spock are two entirely disparate entities. Writing plays such as Vincent, as he did in the Seventies, is a good way of emphasising the gap, but it's hard not to consider another pair of (larger, pointier) ears when you hear about van Gogh chopping off one of his. Jim Jarrett has been touring Nimoy's work around the world for the last 12 years and he wears the role of Theo van Gogh, the art-dealer brother, like an old coat. This is an unaffected piece of storytelling which has Theo opening his heart to an audience in the wake of Vincent's death. As he tells the story of his brother's life, a screen behind him displays old photographs and images of van Gogh's work. At first, there doesn't appear to be enough dramatic potential in this set-up, but it gradually draws us in as Jarrett shines a light into the depths of the artist's troubled soul.
Stefan Golaszewski is a member of the bright young comedy quartet, Cowards, and, on his own initiative, a writer and actor of some talent. His one-man show, Stefan Golaszewski Speaks About a Girl He Once Loved, is a likeable play that finds humour and poignancy in the social inadequacies of the young adult male. He plays a version of himself who, against all his expectations, realises that a beautiful girl is responding to his clumsy advances. It's well-trodden territory, but Golaszewski's observations are finely tuned and charmingly delivered. There are some lovely touches, such as the suitcase full of scraps of paper, all bearing the word 'yes', which he flings in the air when the girl asks to kiss him.
The Time Step is so bad that it could warp into some sort of camp hit. What appears to be a nostalgic melodrama about tap-dancing gradually reveals its true colours, but the incestuous love-triangle and the cross-dressing toddler and the references to Nazi torture techniques are intended to provoke serious emotional responses, not flummoxed laughter.
Global Warming is Gay tackles a subject in need of some serious skewering: our faddish obsession with the colour green. It attacks the cynicism of companies that use ecological exclamation marks to jazz up their branding and, more viciously, the credulousness of consumers who buy green products to salve their consciences. But the play, by Scottish playwright and former Fringe prize-winner Iain Heggie, is too pleased with itself and cannot sustain a relationship comedy alongside the satire.
