Two From Glasgay! Edwin Morgan and a Strange Hunger

Fish and Game – perhaps the flower of Scotland’s response to international experimental theatre – appear to be in a state of flux. Alma Mater, a serious cinematic study of education on cutting edge technology is followed by a double act, in Strange Hungers, that recalls the golden age of the vaudeville. Claude and Maude may have a serious intent – Claude’s PowerPoint presentation is a worthy archaeology of hidden histories – but, like Claude’s lecture, it is interrupted by sensuality, humour and a hot tittie show.

Strange Hungers, perhaps due to Fish and Game co-founder Eilidh MacAskill’s time as The Daily Ukulele Lady, connects easily to the neo-cabaret revival. It alludes to the Weimar era in its accents, without delving into the darkness, aiming at both wry wit – Claude’s musical meditations on group identity – and slapstick –  Maude’s insatiable erotic energy. Yet the narrative, held together by Claude’s absurd scholasticism, lends the show a focus that only The Creative Martyrs can rival. By the time Claude is seduced, ironically by acting out a sentimental Hollywood tragedy, the duo have made a comic and educational trip through history and around the world, suggesting that there are more shows in this peculiar mash-up of experimental theatre and seaside postcard laughs.

Edwin Morgan’s Dreams and Other Nightmares is a highly personal reading of the great Glaswegian poet’s final years: author Liz Lochhead was a friend of the makar, and the cast of three intersperse episodes from his last decade – and flashbacks – with performed recitations of his more introspective poems. As one of the characters, Morgan’s biographer, points out, there will be many lives of Morgan. His identity was fluid, he remained a man of many parts even as a pensioner: whether rejuvenated by love in middle age or still writing on his death-bed, Morgan tirelessly reinvented himself.

Without trying to hide any part of Morgan, Lochhead is respectful, picturing Morgan as a man unwilling to compromise, even with cancer, but equally gentle and private. His late coming out – coinciding with Glasgow’s famous year as City of Culture in 1990 – was a typical gesture: again, his biographer notes that its political impact was crucial in a country still bothered by homophobic legislation but timed to ensure that his family, already dead, would not be involved or harmed.

This contradiction, of a man aware of his public role while cautious about revealing his personal, echoes the tension in his last year, when his physical deterioration  belied his active intellect: as Morgan’s importance becomes part of Scotland’s cultural history, Lochhead’s play captures a moment when he is still close, although gradually moving into the past. Ending on a note of triumph over death, Dreams is an early attempt to assess how the man created the poetry, reconnecting the two and preserving them from academic disconnection.