How We Came To Be Here @ Tramway, Ghosts of Christmas @ The Arches

 

However, the Citizens’ Christmas show, Scottish Ballet, Pasty Cline and a Bottle of Wine all provide more than rote routines, and the basement of The Arches hides the UK’s first fright attraction, a mixture of promenade theatre and live ghost house. Tramway’s resurgence was marked by the debut drama of Tatham and Sullivan, a duo better known for their iconic Heroin Kills exhibition. Much in the fashion of contemporary visual art, which refuses to be bound by genre or media, their How We Came To Be Here moves their aesthetic out of the gallery and onto the stage. Their influences range from old time musical hall – the single character is an amalgam of MC and Orwellian tramp – through to Forced Entertainment’s warped story-telling, with the set of three monolithic sculptures dominating Tramway 1.

The simplicity of the idea, in which a single, extended joke is told, is complicated by the allusions and digressions of the story-teller: it is a bravura monologue, limited to half an hour and to a single narrative that concludes with a self-consciously weak punch line. How We Came to be Here is little more than a shaggy dog tale, an experimental excursion into performance from a team who have always had a powerful theatricality in their visual art. Many of the ideas that they play around are familiar to theatre audiences – the gap between performance and reality, the way that art can encase a story and rob it of authenticity – while the underlying absence of firm purpose or meaning is a common trope in contemporary art. Diverting and well executed, it has the atmosphere of a work in progress, a single character looking for the rest of the cast. And a plot.

Ghosts of Christmas has no aesthetic agenda: it just wants to frighten. Characters borrowed from horror and fairy-tales lurk in the murky Arches’ basement, looming out and sharing their tales of Christmas spirit gone vicious. Santa Claus himself has been driven insane by disbelief and ingratitude: his elves and toys trapped in his nightmare, and the loud noises and flashing lights immerse the small parties of guests in a torture chamber of yuletide savagery. Whether the final sequence’s similarity to popular club night Inside Out is coincidental or a sharp comment on the dance of death that is society’s desperate attempt to shake off the consuming humour of late capitalism, Ghosts is half an hour of adrenaline boosting fun, almost an antidote to saccharine sentimentality.

As for the rest of Christmas, the SECC is obviously keen to establish itself as the biggest pantomime – all star cast, no expensive spared, while Jim Davidson is surprisingly elegant in holding together the Pavilion’s old school romp. The Tron has post-modern humour and gags for theatre fanatics, The Citizens uses Christmas to introduce younger audiences to a proper play that has resonance and romance. And Lady Gaga’s true vocation – an absolute gift to pantomime parody – is thoroughly revealed across the West Coast.