ONE visionary strand of the current Behaviour season is the Platform 18 Award.
It's a mischievous moniker – there is no Platform 18 in Central Station, the Arches' upstairs neighbour. So it's a mythic spot, devised to free up (and support) imaginative work by emergent artists. And there's an appropriately mythic quality at work in the two awarded pieces – Wuthering Heights and POKE – that will transfer to the Traverse when their brief run in Behaviour ends.
Some Arches audiences will have seen a work-in-progress version of Peter McMaster's all-male Wuthering Heights at Arches Live! last September. Those of us who did will be thrilled (and relieved) that McMaster has held his nerve and tweaked his raw material with a light touch. He and his cast of four unstinting comrades – Nick Anderson, Chris Hall, Thom Scullion and Murray Wason – have intensified the sense of open-ness, honesty and personally experienced emotional maelstroms that make the work both moving and thought-provoking.
Some aspects of their rituals and exchanges square up to the Heathcliff myths and cliches found in some aggressively macho stereotypes: these men aren't out to dodge issues of anger or dominance. But Bronte's characters possess wounded souls, and it's the latent scarring, along with the supposedly feminine traits of caring, tenderness and communicating feelings, that McMaster and the others engage with, even to the point of donning frocks. Drag is avoided – instead there is genuine curiosity about the roles men assume and a wonderful degree of joyous male gusto, not least in a synchronised dance to the Kate Bush song. Volunteered moments of memory, aspiration and father/son anecdotes give voice to what so many men feel they have to leave unspoken.
Unspoken thoughts don't really figure in Amanda Monfrooe's POKE, a two-hander performed by Claire Willoughby and Lesley Asare that seethes and boils over with Monfrooe's impassioned researches into the penis-led violence against women that, outwith her allegorical treatment of it, remains a very real part of the modern world. There is a welter of words here, often made dully artificial by her use of an antique Greek theatricality in structure and speech. No amount of graphic sexual imagery, or comedic flashes of priapic puppetry, can pull us by the ears (or eyes) into the dense verbiage that ultimately defeats her heartfelt purpose.
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