High summer in Glasgow’s Southside and a heat wave bears down on the residents of Govanhill, driving them off the streets. Tensions are running high and fantasy and reality are becoming blurred. Read more …
Fighting to reclaim their neighbourhood, the lives of a sleep-deprived new parent and his civic-minded wife begin to unravel. Meanwhile an ambitious Hutchie boy, a pair of young missionaries, a performance artist and her alter ego and an unscrupulous property manager, are forced to confront their monsters.
The sheer vitality and timeliness of Maxwell’s ideas make all of these madnesses worth enduring; in an evening that is often ill-judged, but also far more vivid, timely and true than a whole fistful of shows that are more tasteful, more shapely, and almost instantly forgotten.
With any over-riding ennui undercut by some very Maxwellian one-liners, this is an extravagant and audacious ramble through a city's fractured psyche in all its imagined excess.
Fever Dream: Southside is a show that begs for the construction of a united community; for Glasgow’s identity to be proud and prosperous; for us all to stand as one in the city that belongs to us. But it certainly has a strange way of conveying it.
It’s funny and adventurous, despite times when Maxwell keeps too many narrative plates spinning, and you lose sight of where he’s heading. Dominic Hill’s production is characteristically fluid, but he lets a couple of performances lose their grounding in reality even before the play’s magical realism kicks in.
Glasgow’s southside enters into theatrical mythology.
Even though it lacks a certain punch, it’s a thoroughly enjoyable journey.
Not funny enough often enough, the play swings between sub-standard sitcom and ambitiously surreal, but ultimately failed, soap opera.
Maxwell’s script is only patchily engaging, and though the playwright is to be commended for his attempt to explore a city’s dark underbelly, in the end one can’t help feeling that this overlong piece would have benefited from a few cuts and some structural adjustments.
It deserves kudos for exploring a singular oddball Glasgow that is off the map.
Citizens' Theatre, Glasgow from Thursday April 23, 2015, until Saturday May 9, 2015. More info: www.citz.co.uk