Theatre reviews: Night Waking | Hercules The Bear | Top Hat

Night Waking, Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh ★★★★

Hercules The Bear, The Studio, Edinburgh ★★★

Top Hat, Edinburgh Playhouse ★★★★

There are two intertwined themes at the heart of Sarah Moss’s 2011 novel Night Waking, now transformed into a remarkable two-hour solo show in this Mull Theatre touring production directed by Rebecca Atkinson-Lord, written by Shireen Mula, and performed with astonishing skill and grit by Nicola Jo Cully.

The first theme is the sleepless no-man’s-land of early motherhood, heaven for some, and hell for many; and the other is the fraught subject of English incomers to fragile Hebridean communities, and how they relate to them. Moss’s central character, Anna Bennett, is an academic historian and Oxford fellow married to Giles, a son of the wealthy family that owns the island of Colsay. They have recently moved to the island, and Anna is trying to write her latest book while stranded at home alone with her two little boys, including baby Timothy, who screams all the time.

READ MORE: Night Waking: Mull Theatre's 'darkly funny' new drama based on the Hebrides-set novel by Sarah Moss

Anna therefore finds herself simultaneously oppressor and oppressed; driven almost mad by complete social isolation and her children’s incessant demands, yet also now part of the class and culture that for decades openly tried to remove the Gaelic-speaking population from the island in a brutal act of ethnic cleansing. And when Anna and her son find the skeleton of a long-buried baby near their house, the discovery triggers a research journey which casts new light on her own field of study, and on the story of the island and its people.

The message of the story, in other words - faithfully recorded in this remarkable solo performance, in which Cully plays every character - is that sheer intellect and empathy can sometimes overcome the most profound structural barriers to understanding, or begin to do so. Whether a story told so relentlessly from a non-Hebridean viewpoint can ever really achieve this is an open question; but at least this powerful piece of solo theatre opens up the debate, in a style that is sometimes exasperating, but always bold, truthful and heartfelt.

Based in Dunoon and Glasgow, Tenterhooks Theatre for children and families tours another tale with Hebridean connections across Scotland this month; and in this show, too, there is a slightly awkward relationship with the Scottish identity and voice of the story, which sometimes seems to feature as a kind of joke in itself.

Otherwise, though, Hercules the Bear is the merrily-told tale of Stirlingshire couple Andy and Maggie Robin, who in 1975 bought a grizzly bear cub from a Highland wildlife park, and saw him grow up to become something of a celebrity, particularly after he went missing for 24 days on Benbecula.

With the help of a charming grizzly cub puppet, and an impressive grown-up grizzly suit, the Tenterhooks onstage team of Ben Winger, Diane Thornton and Susie Ferguson deliver a light-touch 50 minute show, a little short on plot and comedic situations, but full of physical and visual fun and games, and of a warm-hearted goodwill that fairly lifts the spirits on a grey autumn evening.

WATCH: I learned to tap dance with the star of Top Hat at the Edinburgh Playhouse

Tap-dancing, alas, was not one of Hercules’s many showbiz skills; but there’s an absolute feast of joyous tap-based numbers in the current UK touring production of the great Irving Berlin musical Top Hat, at the Edinburgh Playhouse this week.

Ninety years on from the premiere of the original Ginger Rogers-Fred Astaire film, there’s still no resisting a score full of such timeless Berlin classics; and if this Chichester Festival Theatre production has the occasional less-than-slick moment, Phillip Attmore in the leading role of Jerry Travers, and Amara Okereke, as his love Dale Tremont, nonetheless enter into the spirit of the songs, and of their troubled love story, with a heartfelt energy that has the audience sighing with delight, and rising to a final standing ovation.

Night Waking is on tour until 31 October, see www.antobarandmulltheatre.co.uk. Hercules the Bear is on tour until 29 October, see www.tenterhooks.org. Top Hat is at the Playhouse, Edinburgh until 4 October, the King’s Theatre, Glasgow, 3-7 February, and His Majesty’s, Aberdeen, 10-14 March.

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