Mammy Goose
Tron Theatre, Glasgow
Four stars
Until January 6
Hold onto your hats! It’s Christmas time and, at the Tron, Dame Johnny McKnight is very emphatically in the house. Playing the titular heroine, who runs a cafe on the Maryhill Road, McKnight (who is also the writer and director) spins through the auditorium like a cross between a motor-mouthed drag queen and a very colourful tornado.
Mammy’s cafe is under threat from the narcissistic witch Vanity Visage (Lauren Ellis-Steele on fine, hiss-inducing form), who (as well as being posh and English, obviously) manages a property portfolio. Unless she can pay the rent arrears, Mammy and her two weans (Lucy Goose, who is an actual goose, and Jack Goose, who isn’t) are going to be thrown onto the cold streets of north Glasgow at Christmas (awwww)!
What ensues is comic mayhem. As ever, McKnight takes hilarious liberties with carefully chosen male members of the audience.
A series of very funny, original songs fit perfectly into a panto that zips along at pace, even when it stumbles. And stumble, delightfully, it does, all the better for McKnight and his equally brilliant partners in crime Julie Wilson Nimmo (Lucy) and Darren Brownlie (Jack) to prove their tremendous capacity for ad-libbing.
The fabulous wild card in McKnight’s narrative is the budding love affair between Jack and Vanity’s long-suffering son Will (the excellent Ryan Ferrie). This subplot blossoms into a celebration of gay marriage (complete with rainbow flag bedspread) so deliciously strident that it would put DUP leader Arlene Foster off her Christmas dinner, so it would.
If the show (which boasts appropriately garish design by Kenny Miller) has a difficulty it is that, as so often with the Tron’s pastiche pantos, its uproarious humour holds more for adults than it does for children.
Mouthpiece
Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh
Two stars
Until December 22
Orla O’Loughlin, the Traverse’s departing artistic director, takes her leave with this crisply directed production of Mouthpiece, Kieran Hurley’s new, non-Christmas play. Tracing the unlikely friendship between Libby (a playwright stricken by mid-life crisis) and Declan (a young, working-class man from Edinburgh’s marginalised housing schemes), the drama promised to expose the ethical (not to mention the aesthetic) problems of the consciously “issue driven” play.
Hurley’s offering is framed as a “play-within-a-play”, by virtue of the occasional appearance of a dramaturge (the kind of person who assists playwrights with the structure of their plays). This artistic advisor records somewhat cynical notes on how to construct precisely the kind of drama Libby is (parasitically) writing about Declan. However, rather than keeping us at an incredulous distance from the action (as Brecht might have done), Hurley allows his central narrative to climb out of its meta-theatrical frame and play itself out as a conventional socio-political and emotional thriller.
The characterisations of Libby and Declan reinforce, rather than overturn, the formulaic caricatures of British theatrical realism. Nor is this altered by the insertion of the sort of “game-changing” moment of sexual contact that a dramaturge might recommend (not least because it is schematically predictable, rather than shocking).
Despite Hurley’s undoubted sympathy with the real life Declans of our society, there is an uncomfortable sense that his play is, first-and-foremost, an expression of the concerns of 21st-century Scottish dramatists; an impression that is strengthened by the numerous, cosy playwrights’ in-jokes and by the fact that the final scene (at the premiere of Libby’s fictitious play) is set at the Traverse itself.
The production is designed with stark intelligence by Kai Fischer, and given better performances than it deserves by fine actors Neve McIntosh and Lorn Macdonald.
Ultimately, however, Mouthpiece looks like the outcome of an ill-advised collaboration between Irvine Welsh and Alan Ayckbourn. It purports to offer a sceptical deconstruction of the well-intentioned, but artistically unrewarding, theatre of liberal conscience, but ends up becoming the very thing it set out to critique.
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules here