Theatre
Secret Show 1
Tron Theatre, Glasgow
Neil Cooper
****
THE clue in this latest adventure by the Blood of the Young company is very much in the title. Inspired by a similar wheeze initiated by the Lyric Theatre, Hammersmith while its building was being renovated, director Paul Brotherston and a football team size cast of 11 are this week inviting audiences to take a chance on their production of an un-named play, without any expectations of what might await them.
This makes the reviewer's job a tricky one, as normal circumstances dictate that some basic elucidation regarding plot are usually forthcoming. As with Agatha Christie's long-running yarn, The Mousetrap, however, giving the game away in such a cavalier fashion here would be quite wrong. To be clear, no spoiler alerts are necessary.
All that can be said of the experience is that it is a cheekily irreverent 80-minute version of a classic play that is performed in the Tron's Victorian Bar. At various points it features a holiday romance between a washed-up hero in a torn Captain America t-shirt and a girl in a swim-suit, a drunken double act straight out of Viz comic and a two-piece band on the small stage at the end of the bar who are more important than you think.
Beyond novelty value, the show nevertheless remains faithful to both the text – most of the time – and the underlying seriousness of the story, and even though they've only had a week's rehearsal, the cast are impressive in everything they do, especially the corpsing. Most of all there is magic, lots and lots of magic in a refreshingly audacious caper that weathers any storm that's thrown at it.
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