BEHAVIOUR 2015: Lippy and O is for Hoolet

Review by Emma Ainley-Walker | 05 May 2015

Dead Centre’s Lippy is a play in three acts. The first is humorous and wrong-foots the audience, and while the second and third acts are much darker, starker, and quieter, the humour still drips through.

Lippy tells the sadly true story of four women, an aunt and three sisters, who barricade themselves in their home and starve themselves to death. Both the girls and the audience are haunted by a single Snickers on stage as we watch them fade – although the actuality feels much more violent.

The performance manipulates. It explores lip reading and the danger of putting words into people’s mouths, but the third act, a Beckettian monologue, does just that. It is a powerful closing image, but the question remains whether Dead Centre should impose any words on these women, or simply allow silence to speak instead.

Ishbel McFarlane’s O is for Hoolet, winner of the Platform 18 award, is a very different production; a one-woman exploration of the Scots language. McFarlane is engaging as herself and as the linguists, philosophers and writers she embodies. She talks of our habitus and what builds us from within, and powerfully shows the change in four-year-old Ishbel’s understanding that ‘O is for Hoolet’, to a complete rejection of the language brought on by education. 

At times it resembles a lecture, but it is the personal nature of the performance that is most powerful, captured by the running theme of The Jock O' Hazeldean, which McFarlane plays a recording of her mother singing at age 19. It is a play about roots and identity as much as it is about language and tradition, and McFarlane is confident in hers throughout.

Behaviour Festival 2015, til Sun 17 May 2015 | Various times and dates | Festival Pass: £60/£53 O is for Hoolet, Traverse Theatre, run ended http://www.thearches.co.uk/events/arts/behaviour-festival-2015