Bloom @ Underbelly

Young Scottish-based company Vocal Point present Bloom, an intense, storytelling piece about poverty and homelessness. Performed by Abraham Parker and Robert Scobie, the story follows two separate lives that meet but do not intertwine as two men from a soup kitchen at the Glasgow City Mission share their tale.

The tales are riddled with suspense; while the narration itself is quite untheatrical (in that things are not acted out but rather narrated), the techniques used are very engaging. The company manage to maintain suspense since one narrative interrupts the other, and then returns to pick up where it left off a few minutes previously. It feels important that the narrators do not speak abstractly about things the two characters have encountered, and, through using these extremely personal stories, do not allow speculation or generalisation. The humanity of the story comes alive in the vividness of the retelling. The absence of elaborate set design or complex lighting cues is not detrimental to the quality of the storytelling; the company intelligently go by the proverb 'less is more', as the story doesn't need anything more complicated to make it real, and only requires the simplicity of a talented narrator.

Even so, the play is still subject to the ethical issue of creating verbatim theatre – is it ethical to reproduce the tale that has happened to someone else? Is it not their story rather than that of Vocal Point? Of course, it could be said that many of the stories and plays that are given a stage – especially at the Fringe – are borrowed from someone else, whether or not that someone is a playwright, a novelist, or a person. Then again, if Vocal Point did not bring these stories to the light, it’s quite possible they would still be unheard, so perhaps in this kind of situation it is necessary to weigh the pros and cons of that story being told, even if it is by a third party.