Introducing the double-bill Dalgety and Fragile, both by David Greig, director Emma Callander gave us a bit of the background to Theatre Uncut. Begun in 2010, it is a creative response to public spending cuts. Asking playwrights to write their own rejoinders in the form of short plays, these scripts are then made available for anyone to perform, any place, anywhere, rights free. Although only a small team and completely unfunded, they have thus found a way to generate and disseminate discussion that is always the first step towards social change.
The first play performed was Fragile, a two-hander between the characters Jack and Caroline. This was introduced by Lesley Hart who joked that, in response to austerity measures, David Greig had requested that the part of Caroline be played by the audience. We were therefore asked to read aloud the dialogue as it was projected onto the backcloth. After a short practise, the play began.
Jack, played by Syrus Lowe, breaks in to the home of his mental health support worker through her bedroom window at five o’clock in the morning. He has heard that the centre, where he meets with her once a week, is being closed. It is his lifeline and he is desperate. She patiently expounds the party line. He wants to effect change, imagines marches in London attended by millions and so covers himself with diesel and picks up a lighter. The play finishes leaving us to wonder whether she/we have successfully persuaded him not to make a stand in this way.
This is a thought-provoking play that forces you to engage with the issues directly, by making you speak the glib words of the politician: saying ‘it’s complicated’, as Jack rightly asserts, is just a way of avoiding saying something simple that is awkward to admit to; that the centre is being closed because people like him don’t matter enough. Acted with real feeling by Lowe, the masterstroke of this audience participation was the contrast between his passion, as he voiced what he truly felt, and our seeming indifference, as we robotically mouthed aloud the lines fed to us.
The second play, Dalgety, was a completely different story. Two police officers in Dalgety – a male Sergeant and a female Constable - are nearing the end of their shift, when a naked man appears outside in Tesco’s car park. Mistaking him at first for the Naked Rambler, the Sergeant decides he has to lock him up because, ‘women don’t want to see penises’.
Outside, more naked people gather and the landscape changes: gone is Tesco’s and its car park, streets and houses too disappear, and in their place is a river running clear and a wild forest. Inside the station, the Sergeant becomes increasingly agitated while his Constable begins to question the modern culture and its structures that the Sergeant clings to like a life raft. She decides to join the naked group and reluctantly leaves him to barricade himself in and wait until the infrastructure he is embedded in becomes relevant once more.
This was superbly acted by Johnny Bett, whose comic timing was the making of this piece, and credit also to Lesley Hart who acted with an easy naturalness, even when she was completely naked and in very close proximity to the audience. The questioning of how we arrive at our taken-for-granted moral values and the juxtaposition of the obdurate Sergeant, so dependent on the trappings of modern life, and the freedom of the group who survive within the natural environment, provided both food for thought and moments of absolute hilarity. It was he, not them, who seemed absurd.
This well-chosen double bill more than met the aims of Theatre Uncut’s ethos, with a thoroughly entertaining hour that also gets you thinking and questioning. How you turn thoughts and questions into meaningful action is another debatable matter, but the seeds for social change are here being planted.
Runs until 24 Aug, 3pm
Tickets £10 (£8)