THEATRE
Thoughts Spoken Aloud From Above
Oran Mor, Glasgow
Mary Brennan
THREE STARS
It's tempting to blame the drugs - stumbled-upon magic mushrooms in Oleg's case, a concoction of marijuana and crack cocaine for his female counterpart - but really it is the present state of Russia that spins the characters into realms of fantastical imaginings. Happy dream-time escapism it's not: in Yuri Klavdiev's episodic play what surfaces is a heightened version of the everyday anxieties, the legal restraints and corrupt practices that currently impact on the freedom of the individual.
Klavdiev illustrates this through a mix of bleak humour, magic realism and febrile turns of phrase that - even in Peter Arnott's pithy, Glesca'-inflected version - teeter towards the over-blown. Kirsty Stuart and Simon Donaldson square up to genre challenges (and character shifts) with an honesty that respects the intensity of feeling - the yearnings for freedom of choice, for freedom of speech, for gay rights - that can only express itself in a mirage of far-fetched narratives.
Take the story, told with amused relish by Donaldson, of killing penguins in the Antarctic. It twists nastily, but then he's really pushing at the boundaries of what starving people will do to survive. What about making money? Would you fight against Ukraine for cash? Out of patriotism? We've heard Donaldson exalting money - and of coveting limited edition trainers - as a means of asserting your identity but here, the call to battle is more about national identity and "showing the Yanks..." If the bruised soul of Putin's Russia is ready to hit out at the West, it also scourges its own, if they are gay. Stuart's lesbian - knifed and bleeding - voices an uncomfortable aria of bigotry and brutality: defiant, even poetic, she dies - his tripping ended, Donaldson's Oleg exits without a backward glance.
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