Sixteen
The Arches Award for Stage Directors
Like many productions before it that were created thanks to this prize, Sixteen was written by its director.
Rob Drummond’s 60-minute three-hander takes as its starting point the conflict between a teenage girl, her older boyfriend and her parents, then adds fertility, bereavement, communication barriers and degenerative disease into the mix.
There are some potentially interesting ideas in here, both in terms of theme and language, but by taking a scatter-gun approach and cramming his short play with enough drama to fill at least six months of soap opera, Drummond fails to capitalise on any of them.
"The premise
suggests an
hour of taught
provocative
theatre, but this
is anything but"
Sara is fifteen going on sixteen – it’s 11pm and in a hour’s time there will be music and cake in the living room before thirtysomething barman Tony heads upstairs to her bedroom for the first time.
The premise suggests a hour of taught, provocative theatre, but this is anything but. After a few outbursts it’s difficult to care whether Tony Snr chops the privates off Tony Jnr or lies down on the stairs to be clambered over come midnight.
It frequently feels as though the piece is being played for laughs.
Heavy-handed thematic references litter the script and the interaction between the characters is confusing. The audience hears Tony in English while Anthony and Mary do not, though the odd word slips through every now, and even the most simple gesture leads to misunderstanding. Drummond seems to confuse artificial insemination and IVF, and disastrously over-simplify the conflict at the heart of his play.
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The Severed Head of Comrade Bukhari
The Arches Award for Stage Directors
This is an altogether different proposition. Oliver Emanuel is a seasoned playwright of considerable flair, and director Daljinder Singh has created a compelling production of his oblique and troubling play about four ‘comrades’ living in an unspecified city.
They may or may not have some trouble distinguishing between reality and fantasy.
"The four performers
interact brilliantly,
finding the seductive
rhythm in the dialogue"
The four performers – Michael E Corrie, Fred Gray, Jamie Brotherston and Allan Lindsay – interact brilliantly, finding the seductive rhythm in Emanuel’s dialogue.
Dressed in a uniform of casual black shirts, jeans and t-shirts, they are unmistakably a gang, but it’s not clear exactly what they represent, or what might have brought them together. They tease and tussle like any group of young men, talking about films, posing philosophical questions and pondering the potential consequences of feeding squirrels. However, casual acts of violence also seem to be an important part of their disaffected existences, and a series of unexpected events leads them somewhere very dark indeed.
A jukebox with a mind of its own provides the unlikely soundtrack to this sinister tale, which has echoes of A Clockwork Orange. The four men have their own bizarre rituals and harsh code of conduct, but perhaps what’s most disturbing, given how little we know about the world they inhabit, is how engaging and essentially likeable they appear to be.
Context would make all the difference to our perception of the events, and in denying the audience one Emanuel holds a mirror up to our own instincts, insecurities and taboos.
Shona Craven
Until April 12 2008, The Arches, Glasgow. Tel: 0870 240 7528. www.thearches.co.uk
April 16-19 2008, Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh. Tel: 0131 228 1404. www.traverse.co.uk
Have you seen either of these productions? Share your views!
What the papers said:
The Herald
(On Sixteen) "The increasingly oddball exchanges reveal Drummond as a purveyor of nouveau absurdism"
(On The Severed Head...) "Singh sets up a series of moodily punctuated set-pieces of which Fassbinder would be proud"
The Scotsman
(On Sixteen) **** "A chilling hour of theatre, full of an almost Pinter-esque sense of the concealed fear and loathing "
(On The Severed Head...) *** "An eerie, fragmented piece of 21st century urban noir"
Sunday Herald:
(On Sixteen) *** "The humour of misunderstanding... is a little over-played, but Drummond has fashioned an affectingly bleak comedy"
(On The Severed Head...) ** "There is no balance to be achieved... in a drama which is so consumed by its own postmodern caricatures"
