Theatre
Tap Dancing with Jean-Paul Sartre
Oran Mor, Glasgow
Mary Brennan
five stars
It don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got – okay, that swing... but some snappy humour, a little bit of sass on the side and some slam-dunk footwork, with taps on, adds a whole lot of pzazz to a play that foregrounds the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre in the title. Writer James Runcie has, however, framed the French thinker with some divertingly high class company: he’s set this song’n’dance foray into the meaning of life in Paris (circa 1956) where Fred Astaire and Audrey Hepburn were filming Funny Face. Life didn’t exactly mirror art, however. While there is a ‘famous philosopher’ who beguiles Hepburn’s character in the film, the meeting with Sartre is a wittily imagined fiction, given to musing on the nature of reality, on-screen and off while back projections recall the Paris of yesteryear.
It’s clever stuff, done with an astutely light touch and the kind of dance sequences that simply gladden the heart. Choreographer Darren Brownlie (as Fred) is totally in step with the Astaire style of oh-so-nifty - yet somehow relaxed - hoofing. Subsequently putting an unsure Audrey (Ashley Smith -charmingly gamine) through her paces, reveals aspects of both characters that then play merrily into the theorising of a distinctly libidinous Sartre (Kevin Lennon, complete with Zut alors! accent.) While Sartre hopes that Audrey will put his ideas on freedom into practice and jump into bed with him, the recently widowed Astaire - now free to dally if he wants - is only really his truest, liberated, self when he dances. Runcie threads the quiddities of existentialism into the froth of a rom-com, lets his tap-talented cast cut loose under the canny direction of Marilyn Imrie. Singing is accompanied live by pianist Stuart William Fleming, ensuring that the sweet, swing-along meaning of life is doo-ah, doo-ah, doo-ah...Do go!
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