Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh, 18 March 2004 and then touring

EVER FELT like becoming invisible? Meet Wee Morag Kerr. On the surface she’s the perfect suburbanite, all twitching chintz curtains and the politest of afternoon teas. Yet once upon a time in ‘An Audience With The Lizard Lady’ she was that very thing, a human chameleon side-show attraction on the run from her own emotional frailties, who later managed to slip into an altogether different kind of anonymity.

Meanwhile, ‘Backstage At The Pussykat Klub,’ Danny Liebermann goes from drag queen to passer-by on a unique and eccentric ancestry you’d never guess to look at him. From Glasgow’s southside to the Berlin backstreets, and concentration camp to back-street dancehall dive, he’s just an every day family man with a story to tell.

The raw material of Gowan Calder’s twin turns comes from the stranger than fiction private lives of a pair of very public artistes on the lower rungs of top light entertainment. Such are the disparities between the outrageous and the everyday; in a more localised, less exploitative way, it’s as if the cast of Tod Browning’s ‘Freaks’ had hooked up with those leftover from an Angela Carter book and popped round to Alan Bennett’s maisonette for shortbread over a good gossip in advance of a brand new series of ‘Talking Heads.’

Jane Dunbar’s production, which features herself as Morag and  Donald Munro as Danny, is as oddly bright and breezy as you could hope for from such delightfully waggish company. What it reveals is the mundane oddness in us all. If anything, Calder’s delicately sketched studies, as crisp and dry as they are, might benefit from some of the latent strangeness at the heart of the matter here. Then again, Morag and Danny have discovered the next best thing to normal, so if it’s good enough for them, it’s probably quite sufficient for us to get our teeth into as well. As for the bread and circuses of cross-dressers and chameleons, let’s leave that to our imaginations.

Two Lives is on tour at the following Highland venues:
Corran Halls, Oban, Friday 2 April 2004
Village Hall, Taynuilt, Saturday 3 April
Spectrum Centre, Inverness, Friday 23 April
Little Theatre, Nairn, Saturday 24 April

© Neil Cooper, 2004