Lorna Irvine reviews a 'grandstanding two-hander' featuring two iconic figures.
Death's a gas as two iconic Glasgow figures, Jimmy Reed, the trade union leader, and Edwin Morgan, the gay poet, find themselves nose to nose in limbo, dressed in their 70s pomp.
Alan Spence's dialogue deftly ricochets in a sublime to and fro Beckettian tragi-comedy. Neither actor--Kevin McMonagle as Morgan nor Steven Duffy as Reid--particularly physically resemble the men, yet they inhabit the mannerisms and cadences uncannily. They are superb--especially McMonagle.
Bonding over atheism, love as strength, being scunnered by critics and the gloomy shadow cast by Thatcherism, they discover more in common than they reckoned on. Reid is sly, quick as a fox, prone to impassioned tirades as plinths become soapboxes; Morgan's is a more measured, if lyrical, response. They undercut each other, drunk on rhetoric and their respective struggles: Morgan's of coming out and being accepted, Reid's of ever being the underdog. It's meta, physical and metaphysical, a memento mori both full of pedantic semantics and knob gags.
This grandstanding two-hander is hopeful of the future, albeit suggesting we are all really stuck in a political and cultural limbo.
Ken Alexander's stage direction: they move, they really, really move.
At A Play, a Pie and a Pint until April 25, then at Aberdeen Lemon Tree from April 27th-2nd May.
RSS