Theatre

The Red Chair

Tron, Glasgow

Mary Brennan

three stars

The chair on-stage is a plain wooden one - a far remove from the opulently upholstered red velvet one at the heart of Sarah Cameron’s noir-ish mythical tale. Even so, as Cameron unfolds the minutiae of what befalls the man who succumbs to its red  plush embrace, you do begin to wonder if all seats harbour such evil intent. Will we be able to rise and go when Cameron’s copious monologue ends? Actually, the real danger is that concentration will falter and flag across the 100 or so minutes (with no interval) of Cameron’s performance.
From first to last, she embodies the shifting dynamics of her own narrative with fabulous gusto. She details, with a boiling intensity of descriptive language, how the man - trapped in the chair - develops an insatiable appetite for food. As he bloats into monstrous blubber, so his wife becomes ever thinner, worn down by the unrelenting cycle of cooking and drudgery. There is a child, a girl, but she’s invisible:cocooned in her attic, feeding her imagination on books. In fact this particular narrative was itself a book before the Clod Ensemble – director Suzy Willson and composer Paul Clark - adapted and staged it for Dundee-born author/performer Sarah Cameron. It’s a genuinely impressive collaboration, the (mostly gloom-ridden) lighting creating a sense of the claustrophobic isolation that overtakes this hapless family. But as Cameron’s voice dips into cadences of braid Scots,veers into literary tags, soars off into flights of grotequerie, you’re caught between unstinting admiration for the chameleon nature of her performance and a reluctant disappointment that so much of it has eluded your ears and understanding - despite the reviving sugary tit-bits served during brief pauses.