Plays, according to the late Peter Brook, inhabit empty spaces which actors transform. It’s rare, however for a play to create quite so strongly a sense of one particular place as ‘Ciara’ does.
Blythe Duff’s character embodies Glasgow in all its contradictions in a powerful and purposeful performance that takes us through many of these.
The daughter of a criminal big-hitter, Ciara has turned her talents to art dealing. No yummy-mummy with a hobby, her hard-headed business sense has built up a gallery that seriously trades its stock.
Confronted with an image that is surely Mother Glasgow, she recognises that what speaks to her will also speak to others, and the relationship that will take her to dangerous places and in so doing save her, is begun.
‘Ciara’ marks out its territory in contemporary Glasgow, where buildings that would have had the psycho-geographer Iain Sinclair in glorious kinks are elbowed out by aggressive shards of glass, an echo of the violent underbelly of a restless city, given neither to sleep nor meditation on its past.
Marriage to one of her late father’s henchpersons has placed Ciara closer than is comfortable to an outburst of simple-minded violence, what has been too casually termed the ‘banality of evil’. Exposed to the realities of mind-sets whose hinterlands can be scraped off with a razor blade, her response is to turn her own vulnerabilities into strengths that ultimately rescue her. Duff’s performance has an integrity throughout, making her character’s journey something of the city’s itself.
Harrower’s script is an understated master class in characterisation and the creation of a sense of place. Like the drawing Ciara so admires, Glasgow broods above the action, an omnipresence neither Ciara nor her fellow citizens can ever escape.
In these straitened times, and amid competing claims on one's time and purse, if you can only manage one Fringe outing in 2013, Ciara well repays both on both counts.
Runs til 25th August, various times