Review by Jennie Macfie
Plan B: A Wee Home from Home
5 Nov 2009 in Dance & Drama, Highland
OneTouch Theatre, Eden Court, Inverness, 4 November 2009
IT CAN’T be easy dancing in a suit, tie and heavy leather shoes, but it didn’t seem to hold Frank McConnell back at all. Accompanied by Dundee’s finest, the ineffable Michael Marra, and deftly directed by fellow Partick man Gerry Mulgrew, A Wee Home From Home is over 21-years-old, but like its protagonists, wears its age very well. Billed as a dance play, it had drawn a good crowd, many of whom were far too young to have seen it first time around.
Plan B - A Wee Home from Home (Photo - Maria Falconer)
The action begins as a rosy-tinted, almost sentimental, summation of McConnell and Mulgrew’s memories of their Glasgow childhoods expressed in song and dance – Irn Bru, a pint of heavy, Old Firm matches, Sauchiehall Street, comedy drunks, the ‘Song of the Clyde’, ‘Glesga belongs tae me’ – all the cartoon shorthand for Glasgow, doled out with a light touch and lighter feet.
Not for long, though. Within a tune or two, McConnell’s team had stolen behind the gates and through the broken windaes to show us the Dear Green Place’s underbelly; dead end streets, poverty, fitba’ in the street, ‘big men’, sectarian marches, alcoholism and casual everyday violence. Dominies administering the tawse to weans, thrashing out the sparks of hope and talent, leaving scars that never heal.
According to the census in the mid-19th century, three quarters of the population of Glasgow had been born in Argyll, and the deeply ingrained traditions of warm, welcoming-to-the-point-of-suffocating Highland hospitality endure even today. Behind the closed doors of home, under the relentlessly cheerful White Heather Club atmosphere, wound around with tartan and nick-nacks, something deeper and darker was coming to light in this work.
Marra, in natty checked suit and brothel creepers, turned out to be no mean actor. Reading a series of increasingly pointed ‘Amazing But True’ “facts” from The Daily Record, hammering out beercan percussion on corrugated iron, hitting the nail on the head with ‘Mother Glasgow’ and ‘Radio Pointless’, his initially comic turn grew progressively, darker, more menacing, and downright sinister as the show went on. As McConnell repeatedly asked, “Who are ye?”. Ingmar Bergman would have known the answer.
(A Wee Home From Home is on tour aorund Scotland until 4 December, and can also be seen at Fortrose Academy on 30 January 2010. Tour dates and a download of ‘Mother Glasgow’ by Michael Marra with the BBC SSO for 99 pence are on the plan B website).
© Jennie Macfie, 2009
