ALFRESCO site-specific theatre is not what Mayfest has come to mean in
Glasgow's peripheral housing schemes, where shows are more usually
programmed into community centres. Greater Easterhouse Theatre, an
incorporation of various local companies, will do the rounds of those
local venues before ending its run in the Mercat Theatre in distant
Drumchapel but its show opened in the perfect surroundings of its actual
setting.
Provanhall House in Auchinlea Park is contemporary with Glasgow's more
famous ''oldest house'' Provand's Lordship and its courtyard provided a
natural space for this drama by local writers Freddie Anderson and Joe
Dornan about one of its residents, Dr John Buchanan (Alan Burns), and
his friendship with the engineer James Watt.
It is set in 1791, when Buchanan's hysterical housekeeper Rachel
(Margaret Harris) still has memories of Charles Edward Stuart. Watt (Ken
Turel) is overseeing the building of the nearby Monklands canal but can
already foresee the coming of the railway rendering the waterway
obsolete.
The show, linked in verse and song by Charlie Robertson and directed
by Robert McKain, is full of contemporary resonances, not least in
Watt's need to move to England to find the capital for his work. The
eternal conflict between science and religion is personified in Mary
MacPherson's fundamentalist Mother Buchan waiting to be yanked up to
heaven by the hair.
A concluding dream sequence flashes forward to the end of this
century, with Watt a statue in George Square and an environmental
message in his dialogue with two Glaswegians celebrating the new
millennium. ''How could my dreams become your nightmares?'' he asks. In
such weather and setting it was almost hard to share his concern.
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