Cause it’s all very well wanting to be a voice for the voiceless eh. Until you find oot the voiceless have a fucking voice and mibbe they might want tay use it. Read more …
Salisbury Crags. Twilight. A woman takes a step forward into the air. A teenage boy pulls her back. Two lives are changed forever.
Libby whiles away her days in New Town cafes and still calls herself a writer – but she’s not put pen to page for years. Declan is a talented young artist struggling with a volatile home life in Pilton. As they form an uneasy friendship, complicated by class and culture, Libby spots an opportunity to put herself back on track, and really make a difference.
She needs Declan’s story. In all its messy, painful detail.
But does she have the right to it?
When does poverty portrayal become poverty porn?
O’Loughlin’s production is moving and tense, frequently funny and full of poignant moments.
The play becomes a wrestling match for the soul of a divided society in which art imitates life imitating art in a safe space where everyone likes a bit of rough.
It’s not often I come out of the theatre with my mind spinning in circles around a knotty ethical dilemma. Although Mouthpiece is as problematic as it is provocative, it’s all the better for being both.
Mouthpiece remains a play that wrestles fiercely and brilliantly with the dilemmas faced by serious artists in a bitterly divided society.
The problem is one of too many ideas being insufficiently thought out, rather than a lack of them.
O’Loughlin’s direction is unflashy, enabling Neve McIntosh and Lorn Macdonald to deliver two distinct yet emotionally authentic performances.
Provocative, daring and completely riveting, Mouthpiece proves yet again that the Traverse is Scotland’s leading light when it comes to important and exciting new writing.
It will move and shock those from Edinburgh and beyond as the points it raises should be heard by all, no matter the side of the city.
Kieran Hurley’s gripping Edinburgh-set two-hander confronts the economic divide in the city and the stranglehold the middle-classes have on the arts.
The applause came in fast and loud at the final blackout. Too fast. The performances are outstanding and deserve it but Mouthpiece is one of those plays that is yelling at yous to shut up and think.
“It’s very meta”, as one of the characters glibly puts it. Yes indeed, and, alas, the less meaningful for it.
Mouthpiece looks like the outcome of an ill-advised collaboration between Irvine Welsh and Alan Ayckbourn. It purports to offer a sceptical deconstruction of the well-intentioned, but artistically unrewarding, theatre of liberal conscience, but ends up becoming the very thing it set out to critique.
Mouthpiece's all-too human subjects stage a defiant, complicated portrait of class and privilege on our own doorstep.
Kieran Hurley's provocative and stark two-hander explores the class divide in society and theatre, and asks: what are we going to do about it?
Kieran Hurley's Mouthpiece is 'a vigorous examination of how appropriation and exploitation threatens authenticity'.
Kieran Hurley--Mouthpiece
Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh from Saturday December 1, 2018, until Saturday December 22, 2018. More info: www.traverse.co.uk
Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh from Thursday February 6, 2020, until Saturday February 15, 2020. More info: www.traverse.co.uk
Tron Theatre, Glasgow from Thursday February 27, 2020, until Saturday February 29, 2020. More info: www.tron.co.uk
RSS feed of Theatre reviews