Crunch, Hitch and Shred – Macphail Friday 28th September, review.

Gary had a good feeling about us. Gary thought we were winners. Gary got an Aberdonian to shred a real £10 note on stage. Their own. So began an evening of theatre that started out as a painfully funny black and white parody of over-confident motivational lectures and ended in Italy with a shy man in a rainbow crowd taking on the G8. This was two separate solo pieces of theatre, Crunch and Hitch, written and performed by Gary McNair and Kieran Hurley.

In “Crunch”, Gary was all slicked back hair, evangelical enthusiasm and memorable soundbites about money being the biggest belief system. Running the show like a motivational speaker he had us bidding for unknown amounts of money and shredding the stuff on stage as he promised to donate the same amount to our chosen charities, which I have no doubt that he will. He reminded us how much of our finances are actually just numbers and how the entire system relies on us not all wanting to see our own cash at the same time. It was uncomfortable, but funny. and it cost me a tenner. I would not be surprised had there been a small but determined run on the cash machines in Ullapool on Saturday morning. Under the spivvy suit and the greasy hair was a solid message, and it took wings in the second half, flown by Kieran Hurley.

Keiran, all skinny jeans and vulnerability, hitched alone to the G8 summit in September 2009. He really did this, and he hadn’t got a clue. He got stuck in the Paris road system. He didn’t speak Italian. He was all on his own. He eventually got a helpful piece of paper, a Bust sheet, that told him to learn some Italian and not to be on his own. Oh joy. But he survived to be part of a rainbow crowd who somehow believed, as Patti Smith said at the time, that “The people have the power to redeem the work of fools”. The fools being the G8 leaders, the spivvy-suited purveyors of the belief system that Gary had just crunched. This took some of the audience back a few years. Nearly 30 years in one case, to the huge anti-apartheid demonstrations of 1984, dancing through London to the strains of “Nikosi Sikelel’ iAfrica” with the roaring hatred of the National Front only two streets away. Between the two belief systems, a wall of enormous smiley London policeman who liked our music and didn’t like the Front one little bit. The 1980’s were not always as the media chooses to remember. But Keiran wasn’t in London, but in Italy, hundreds of miles from his Glasgow home, faced with Italian riot police and a growing sense that to challenge the work of powerful fools was futile. Well, hang on Keiran, look what happened to apartheid. And your brave and moving piece of theatre is anything but futile. When’s the next summit? We could whip up a busload from Ullapool….

This was an inspired and serendipitous pairing of two great stand-alone pieces of theatre. We ought to see more of these two.