Reality @ Tron Theatre

A teenage boy is standing on stage talking with the speed of a ladder running up a stocking. The sound is familiar. It’s the relentless buzz of “me, me, me” heard from every wannabe of the Pop Idol ilk.
Following sell-out performances at Glasgay 2007, the Tron hosts the return of writer and actor Martin O’Connor’s Reality, a trio of satirical monologues exploring themes of masculinity, fatherhood and fame. Each of his characters - a schoolboy dreaming of celebrity; a marooned soldier in Afghanistan; a young father entangled in the tentacles of a games console – are struggling with the idea of themselves.
In the first and funniest segment, a teenager outlines his determination to join the ranks of z-list celebrity, even if it involves waiting in audition lines that would put Soviet bread queues to shame. As a character he’s ideally presented in monologue form, simply because his interior world is made up of the same egocentric drone, a drone that’s reflected back at him en masse across the multi-channel hive of the entertainment industry.

And if the remaining monologues don’t quite build upon the momentum of the opening, this is only because O’Connor inhabits the first character’s skin so well. Perhaps he is channelling his own teenage ghastliness, or exorcising a secret craving for plastic fame.

Yet O’Connor has sympathy for his characters. He is a satirist, not an assassin, and we’re all being implicated here. Each of us imagines that our consumption of celebrity culture is conducted from a distance, with a knowing smirk. Yet we’re all still looking. And while we look, there will always be someone willing to perform.

“After all”, asks O’Connor’s teen wannabe as he counts the days to his next Shipwrecked audition. “What else am a gonnay do?”