Human cost of industrial failure at Linwood

Tron Theatre, Glasgow

Neil Cooper

FROM beneath a pile of cardboard surrounding a park bench, a middle-aged man comes crawling out from the wreckage he calls home. The Man - a casualty of the rise and fall of the Linwood dream, when the manufacture of the Hillman Imp put the small Renfrewshire town on the map before the plug was pulled as bigger, shinier products dazzled the car-buying public more - brings in the new millennium with a dram and tells his story.

It's a sorry and sadly familiar tale he tells, of how he started on the production line straight from school as a wet-behind-the-ears youth, met his wife and built a life on the back of it, only to be unceremoniously thrown on to the scrapheap as capitalism failed and the dream faded. But it gets worse, as he loses his life-long love and hits the bottle, only to appear to have survived, at least, seriously bruised, but unbowed.

At first glance, Paul Coulter's monologue, performed with steely commitment by Vincent Friell in a production by Liz Carruthers for the White Stag Theatre Company, could just be a period piece from the time of Margaret Thatcher's inglorious war on the working class.

However, look closer and, 14 years after the turn of the century when the play is set, it is not simply an elegy for a community killed by capitalism's false promises.

It is also a warning that, with an even crueller government in office in Westminster, and people falling through the cracks just like Friell's character, this is as much about now as then as a play where happy endings are something that happen elsewhere.

Whingeing Women

King's, Glasgow

Mary Brennan

THE original "whingeing women" were actually members of a drama group in Llanrwst in North Wales. Now, their devised monologues have been packaged into a touring vehicle where the cast, along with the accents and some of the material, changes and takes on local colour - thereby complementing the in-yer-face blue-ness that cheerfully veers into the 50 Shades of Grey palette. In Glasgow, we had a foursome of superbly funny women: Gail Porter, Joyce Falconer, Janette Foggo and Angela D'arcy. They served up even the lurid, graphic stuff with a rollicking good humour that counteracted the cringe factor when near-the-knuckle references reached into intimate body parts.

The stories they tell are, apparently, based on the real-life experiences disclosed during those Llanrwst drama workshops. Topics range from sex (or lack of) to breast cancer, infidelity, alcoholism, rape, child abuse - though not all of these are given the comedy treatment, even if the skites at men, their "bits" and their behaviour with said bits had elderly ladies near me giggling like girlies on their second illicit glass of shandy. However, Porter's genial, jocular account of living with alopecia brought spontaneous murmurs of sympathy while Janette Foggo's stoic, rueful description of her life at 50 - when her husband was already gripped by early-onset Alzheimer's - saw some heads nodding in silent recognition of how the illness destroys more than just old memories.

On paper, this show looked tacky, full of shock and ohhhh! sex talk. The women on stage, however, gave it relevance to an audience who knew the home truths in these whinges, and were happy to hear sauce 'n' salt jokes about them.