Memory Cells

To a greater or lesser degree, the annals of every country on the planet are littered with laws restricting women.

And in recent months there’s been a flood of news stories detailing how that controlling impulse has been taken to its chilling but logical conclusion: that of literal imprisonment.

There was the discovery of Elizabeth Fritzl, who had been kept for decades in an Austrian basement; the unrepentant Sheffield businessman who fathered nine surviving children by his two daughters; similar cases in Argentina, Colombia and Italy and then the return of Jaycee Lee Dugard, missing since 1991.

In Louise Welsh’s new commission by Glasgay! – which this year takes as its theme the exploration of the family – the character of Barry (Tam Dean Burn) may flit between perpetrator and protector, but throughout he craves the same thing: control.

As well as the recent media stories and coverage of the 2006 escape of Natascha Kampusch, whose captor subsequently killed himself, Welsh says Memory Cells was inspired by the art of Scottish graphic artist James Pryde and Louise Bourgeois. There’s certainly something of the latter’s vulnerable, sexualised sculptures to the opening scene where Cora (Kirstin McLean) lies in bed in a white nightdress, her limbs jutting out at sharp angles.

Barry enters with a bucket and tenderly bathes her. Is she an invalid? Not quite. Locked in a basement for a year without sun or exercise, she’s become enfeebled.

No longer does she bang on the door and scream for help; instead she tells Barry she loves him and gives way to his advances. Both are locked into a dependent relationship: when Cora says she’d die without him, it’s uncertain whether she’s simply referring to the fact Barry brings her food. Barry positively thrives on that dependence and is determined to sever all Cora’s bonds to the world outside.

Though some of the dialogue is occasionally a little heavy handed or over-literary and Burn’s volatility sometimes slips into the comic macabre, the interplay between the two actors – for whom Welsh created the roles – is never less than electric. That the piece’s backwards structure isn’t immediately evident is testament to Welsh’s unshowy writing and the actors’ subtle changes in character while offering an ending that poses more questions than it asks.

Straining and pulsing with tension, Memory Cells is like thread over a freshly stitched wound.