Yer Granny by National Theatre of Scotland

National Theatre Of Scotland’s new comedy Yer Granny, is set in Glasgow, in a flat above an obsolete chip-shop, pushed out of business by its competitors across the road.  Set in a hyper realistic but hideous 1970's living room, decorated alarmingly in mismatched patterns and beige, the Bay City Rollers blast out from the radio, and the clothing is the cream of seventies fashion.

The occupants are the Russo family. A 100 year old Granny, played by Gregor Fisher, who is greedily eating the family out of house and home, the audience wondering just how much food she can get through.  Diligent hard-working grandson Cammy and his wife Marie try to keep things going but are obstructed by their hapless family members. Cammy's brother Charlie is a 'musician' who has written a few bars of 'Requiem for Accordian' and not much else. Unwilling to work, he impedes Marie's plan for him to get a real job, at every opportunity. Innocent and romantic Aunt Angela wants to help out, and her spiral into drug dealing is perhaps the most humorous aspect of the play. Nice but dim Daddy's girl Marissa completes the family set up.  

The broad comedy of the first act darkens in the second.  Granny's insatiable appetite drives the family to desperate measures. There is a sense of impending doom and the morality of the family dissolves under the strain. Marie leaves her husband, they sell the furniture piece by piece, Marissa becomes a prostitute, Aunt Angela deals drugs. Charlie perhaps has the most outrageous approach to the problem, trying to lose Granny at the fair, attempting to murder her and inventing an elaborate scheme to marry her off to the much younger octogenarian Donnie Francisco.

The play appears to have many layers of meaning.  Granny could represent our global consumption of the world's resources, threatening ecological catastrophe. She could represent the parasitic matriarch in some European societies, controlling the lives of her children and grandchildren. She could represent capitalism, the welfare state or communism devouring it's government, its economy and its society.

It asks "What is your breaking point?" "At what point do you sell out your moral values?"

Based on Roberto Cossa’s Argentinian classic farce La Nona, written in 1977, a time of great difficulty for playwrights in Argentina, when artistic censorship was in place and Cossa asked "Do we Argentine playwrights even exist?"

Soon after Cossa’s condemnation of artistic censorship, he and other Argentine playwrights launched ‘Teatro Abierto’ (Open Theatre), a movement that would become one of the most important artistic resistances during the dictatorship. In a massive festival that generated over 25,000 spectators, artists came together to stage one-act plays that directly or indirectly spoke out against the dictatorship and proved that yes, Argentine playwrights do exist.

During the dictatorship, there was no censorship for plays before they were staged. After the premiere, some plays, like Eduardo Pavlovsky’s intense family drama ‘Telarañas’, were banned. However, many plays with decidedly political undercurrents premiered to great public and critical success, one of which was La Nona in which our ravenous Granny ends up killing her children.

I'm not sure that the depth of meaning was clear to the Gregor Fisher fans in the Lyric, who laughed and cheered at every move he made.  The audience laughter at the comedy of the first act lessened considerably as the surreal plot and dark humour took over and people realised that there was no way out from the ferociously gluttonous Granny who at the end threatened to eat the audience as well.

Yer Granny is at the Lyric until Saturday. Click here to find out more.

Read more about Teatro Abierto here: http://www.argentinaindependent.com/top-story/thirty-years-after-teatro-abierto/

Enquirer at Belfast Festival

My last theatre event of Belfast Festival was Enquirer by the National Theatre of Scotland. Despite my disinterest in journalism, my hack friends had been telling me how brilliant the show was, and so off I went to an unused office in Fountain Street, to see what the fuss was about. We were ushered in and told to have a look around.  The office was set up as real newspaper office complete with overflowing bins, newspaper bundles and a lifesize cardboard cutout of a blonde to throw darts at. There was a conference room, an editor's office and a particularly novel room inside a filing cabinet. Actors read articles on their computers, counted money and ambled around the room mumbling to themselves.

When the time came to begin, we surrounded the actors as they began their story. As a promenade piece the set and direction worked well.  As a small person, it is always relatively difficult to get into a spot at the front where I can see, especially if you are continually moving around.  However the strategic placement of newspaper bundles at different heights allowed some audience members to sit at times, and the placing of actors sitting on top of filing cabinets and desks and moving through the audience meant that even the shorter people were able to follow what was happening.

Prompted by the recent phone hacking scandals and set against the background of the Leveson inquiry, the show focuses on the morality of the newspaper world. The script is based on interviews with a number of journalists, some of whom were very honest about the failings of the industry and others who claimed innocence. This contradiction is one which is obvious throughout.  While one editor denies all knowledge of any married editor even having an affair, another admits to having a book in which all payments to sources were written down.

The play also highlights the public passion for reading fluffy news. Editors will not prioritise really important news pieces such as the massacre in East Timor if it's 'a big news day' in London, such as a Royal wedding.  This piece is really the only time in the show that I actually felt anything for one of the characters. The rest of the time I spent wondering how these neurotic, caffeine fueled, coarse people managed to get away with being so horrible.  Even as a poor journalist recounted a persisting  nightmare in which she viciously murdered Bryan Ferry, I couldn't help but think she probably deserved the nightmares.        

But morality is not the only focus for this play, there is also the belief that online news is a real threat to printed newspapers and I thought the final image of all 6 actors buried in shredded newspaper was particularly strong.  One journalist pointed out that she had more followers on Twitter reading her writing than she had reading her column in the newspaper.  It certainly gave me the impression that where the phone hacking scandals had caused arguments and regret, they only changed a long accepted way of working; it is actually the digital age that will cause the end of the industry altogether.

All in all I enjoyed the play, but I was not blown away by it as others were. I thought the setting was perfect, the promenade nature of the performance suited the subject and the acting was strong.  The lighting suited the piece well and stage management deserve a gold star for moving around so much shredded paper. However, I did not feel any connection with the characters. I had very little sympathy for them or even understanding of them and still have no interest in journalism.