Theatre

We Interrupt This Programme

Oran Mor, Glasgow

Mary Brennan

two stars

Time was, you could hold just about everything up to useful ridicule: politicians. celebrities – from major to minor – corporate fat cats... the possibilities were a boon to late-night satirists on TV and to many a wee, independent-minded theatre company.

Sitting here, in Oran Mor, it’s hard to avoid bright memories of Wildcat, the resolutely rambunctious music theatre group that in the 1980s and 90s lammed into a commendable spectrum of topics that ranged from loan sharks in Clydebank to US foreign policy in Latin America.

The rorty Wildcat was co-founded by the late David MacLennan – the driving force behind Oran Mor’s Play, Pie and Pint – and Dave Anderson who clearly still carries a torch for Wildcat’s values, and even now brings them on-stage in We Interrupt This Programme.

Times have changed, however. And while the DM Collective – both as a collaborative body of writers and as a performing ensemble – have a host of valid targets in their satirical sights, much of what they set out to pillory in this series of sketches and musical numbers is beyond the reach of barbed comment, mockery or even derision. You simply cannot shame a man like Trump: he’d probably want to annexe one of the show’s mordantly yee-hah! songs, We Want a White Man in the White House a a campaign anthem.

If the material struggles to be entertainingly hard-hitting, the cast – Dave Anderson, Elizabeth Caproni, Cat Crozier and Ross Mann – offset its shortcomings with the kind of barnstorming energy that stokes an audience’s level of engagement and prompts them to come onside... and even laugh.I do wonder, however, if laying into broadcast news – playing the Trump card of ‘fake news’ – is as funny as it might have been before genuine attempts by the media to tell uncomfortable truths made investigative journalists an endangered species.