Theatre reviews: Pothole Kingdom | Mayday
Challenging times are galvanising Scotland’s creative community – as two urgent dispatches from new political frontlines demonstrate, writes Joyce McMillan
Pothole Kingdom, Oran Mor, Glasgow ★★★★
Mayday – Rapid Responses To Our Times, Central Hall, Edinburgh ★★★★
To say that there has been a muted cultural response to the current Scottish election campaign is an understatement; in a nation so divided by the constitutional question, artists often hesitate to take any stand that will inevitably alienate half of their potential audience. Recently, though, the arrival of new players in politics seems to be galvanising Scotland’s creative community into action; and that shift is brilliantly captured in the latest Play, Pie, Pint lunchtime drama Pothole Kingdom, briefly at Oran Mor.
Set in the basement of a community centre somewhere in Fife, Ross McKay’a clever and insightful 50-minute three-hander imagines two local councillors – a hugely experienced old hand called Jeremy, once a Tory, now Reform, and Viv, a newly-elected Green – preparing for a shared surgery session, when a desperate man called Lenny appears with a home-made bomb, apparently set to go off at any minute.
What gives the show an extra edge is that Lenny – brilliantly played by Martin Donaghy – is not there to bargain. Driven to distraction by the stress of caring for his much-loved mother who has just died, and by the final blow of eviction from their shared council house, he simply wants to die, and to take his former Tory councillor with him; he therefor has no idea how to defuse his bomb, even if he wanted to.
The play, in other words, offers a searing, pressure-cooker insight into the failure of local democracy in Scotland that underpins so much of voters’ growing dangerous disillusion with politics itself. And of course, neither Andy Clark’s all-too believable Jeremy, nor Nalini Chetty’s idealistic but arrogant Viv, has any real idea how to deal with the anger of Lenny and thousands like him; those who have spent a lifetime trying to make themselves heard through conventional political channels, and have experienced nothing but the disappointment and betrayal that leads, in the end, to pure destructive rage.
Which brings us precisely to the starting point of the National Theatre of Scotland’s fierce whirlwind of a Mayday event, staged for one night only on Friday, at the Central Hall in Edinburgh. The phrase May Day, of course, suggests traditional celebrations of spring, and the long-established annual festival of the labour movement and workers’ rights.
Mayday is also, though, the international distress call for those in life-threatening danger; and the NTS’s Mayday event – subtitled Rapid Responses To Our Times, and co-curated by director Cora Bissett and writer Hannah Lavery – seemed driven by a sense of absolute emergency surrounding the rise of the far right, the emergence of Reform as a serious political force in Scotland, and the return to mainstream politics of views that would been considered too cruel and exclusionary to be acceptable, just a decade ago.
The show therefore began with a short and disturbing two-handed play by Hannah Lavery in which an ageing pro-independence politician, beautifully played by Sanjeev Kholi, confronts a young spin doctor – a chilling Leah Byrne – who believes 21st century politicians must now get in line with new forms of ‘patriotism’ that are less tolerant, and far less inclusive. It continued with a powerful reading of Michael Rosen’s superb poem about his parents, Harold and Connie, and their struggles against the far right as Jews in London in the 1930s, and then during the Second World War.
And what followed, in the same spirit, was nothing less than a brilliant, invigorating, and notably well-crafted two-and-a-half-hour Scottish festival of anti-fascism, featuring over 30 acts, and ranging through poetry, music, more short dramas and powerful movement sequences, to the beautiful voices of Edinburgh's Loud and Proud Choir, singing Ali Burns’s piece Stonewall. No-one mentioned the election, of course. Yet the message was crystal clear; get out there and vote for parties and politicians who truly believe in the messy business of democracy – or you may find, one of these years, that you have no chance to vote at all.
Pothole Kingdom, run completed; Mayday was a one-off event.
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