Lady Fingers and Empire Biscuits

Lady Fingers and Empire Biscuits

The Arches, Glasgow

Mary Brennan

This is a piece that howls, a piece that growls - and by the end, you don't know whether to laugh or shudder.

Either way, you're unlikely to leave the space that Rosana Cade has commanded feeling indifferent to a visceral solo performance that has vented a range of cogent social issues.

These centre, with blistering honesty, on her own identity - she is a radical gay artist based in Glasgow - but they push insistently into the broader, increasingly prickly terrain of what shapes who we are as individuals and as a nation.

Cade had, initially, been interested in the sexual legacy of the Raj. She returned from India possessed of a volatile confusion that she now channels into this performance.

The mood of old regime is set when the Butler (Craig Manson) seats us at a dining table (set with Empire biscuits) intoning "remember your manners and know your place."

Cade herself is in the bald-pated, tail-coated persona of a pukka chap who sputters and rants over the well-worn phrases that - regardless of exact words - mouth of us and them divisions, and a superiority that has history and the law as back up.

Cade's interest in India's recent reintroduction of anti-homosexuality legislation, however, shape-shifted into something else - an unnerving awareness of her alien Britishness which she expresses, on the table, in a whimpering display of fear and puzzlement.

That same table subsequently supports an unbridled nakedness - and a graphic intimacy with the Empire biscuits - when Cade, who has already connected carnally with dogs, becomes a yelping bitch in heat.

It's her way of hounding the conventions of normality and it bites, sharp and hard .