A Lot of Alienation

The National Theatre has given the keys to an old shop in Govan Cross to some of Glasgow’s most energetic young performers.

Article by Gareth K Vile | 25 Feb 2010

I did not realise quite how alienated I am. I am standing in the middle of an anarchic, immersive Allotment. It’s the kind of theatre I dream about – the actors encourage the audience to get involved, there’s a cheap bar in the corner, I can graffiti the walls with impunity. There’s even a live band rocking the mall, a debating pit and angry mobs roaming the straw-strewn floor.

Peter McMaster hands me a bomb and asks me to throw it at a group of debaters, whom he claims aren’t radical enough. He charges into the discussion, shouts about hierarchy through a megaphone. I undo the bomb. Inside, there is forty pence and a message to “phone someone you love”. I am wondering whether the person I’d like to call would slam the phone down. By the time I look up, McMaster is being accused of demagoguery and an election has made one of the audience the event’s ruler. I scrawl “Radical Subjectivity” on the set one last time, and make my way back to the Underground.

After the pantomime season, it’s a relief that the rough stuff is re-emerging. Gary McNair, another RSAMD graduate, recently invaded the Oran Mor with Crunch. His evangelical zeal for financial reform rather charmed the older ladies, even when he was inviting them to destroy their cash. Money jumbles up the cheap suit patter of self-affirmation, sets forth a programme to escape the psychic credit crunch without ever leaving McNair’s boyish enthusiasm. By bringing it to Òran Mór, it gains an edge that it didn’t have at The Arches last year: here, it is in a programme with straight scripts, and a Live Art monologue fees fresh. In The Arches, it was next door to someone shoving a Mars bar up their arse. Difficult to make anything dangerous after that.

Allotment is one of the best ideas that The NTS have had since they bounced three squaddies around the Edinburgh Fringe. At the moment that my least favourite debate in theatre has just turned up – the one about how Scotland ought to be staging more of its neo-realist scripts or renaissance classics – The NTS decides to get in bed with the physical theatre gang. Giving Eilidh MacAskill, from Eilidh’s Daily Ukele and Fish and Game, the run of Govan Cross is a brave, intelligent move. Even better, they let her, and her allies, replace the script with a series of staged actions. For the rest of the evening, the audience got to go wild, either pissing it up or slinking between happenings.

As with Kill Your Timid Notion, the Allotment crew have noticed radical events demand that the artist doesn’t get to show off while the poor audience worships. Allotment was diffusive, disorganised, chaotic, shifting, confusing and loud. It’s an experiment, a place more likely to lead to brave new theatre than be the thing itself. It also allows the audience to control their experience, not worry whether they have understood the predetermined message that the author or director have decided to explain to us, like elderly headmasters to our blank-slate schoolchild’s minds. I just choose to be miserable and removed. Theatre can be just like real life, sometimes.

http://www.nationaltheatrescotland.com/