Gareth K Vile has a look inside Tiny Door Theatre Company's production of A Scheme.
Tiny Door Theatre Company have a clear mission. The two plays that make up A Scheme take a sharp look at the underbelly of Glasgow life: Concrete Bird visits a shut-in case on one of those soon to be demolished tower blocks, while Coconut Badger stars an aging gangster who wants to bring back the old codes of street fighting. Both feature lots of West Coast dialect, and chibs.
Since both plays are short, and the work of new writers, they are best regarded as “in progress”: Concrete Bird does a nice line in portraying nervous illness, and the humour of Badger’s bad guy wins over the audience despite his scarred face and dubious morality. They recall the neo-realist strands of Scottish drama, picturing the culture that reached it zenith in No Mean City. In many ways, the gritty realism represents a romanticisation of the underclass. The characters, for all their slang and swearing, are articulate and winning. The Concrete Bird humanises a murderer; Badger gives the best lines to an elderly thug who likes stabbing and striping faces.
There’s a sharp contrast with two other West Coast plays recently staged in the Tron: Random Accomplice and Rain Dog have both responded to the credit crunch through cheery comedy. Tiny Door have gone for “socially relevant”. I’m pleased that theatre hasn’t entirely been relegated to a grinning jester, even when I doubt that such harsh visions necessarily represent the whole Glasgow picture. Tiny Door’s vision, based on detailed research, is the reconnection of drama with a wider audience. This kind of tough talking melodrama has been successful in the past, and their youthful energy lends A Scheme an immediacy and vitality that is lacking in many contemporary scripts.
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