Short stories. Photo: Richard Campbell
Craig Taylor’s weekly Guardian column always had the feel of something eavesdropped. Each little encounter, each tiny dialogue, had an air of the plausible and it’s easy to see why they’d appeal to a theatre-maker; gathered together they have a gentle, cumulative power.
There’s an element of promenade to RT productions’ staging. The first playlet, an amusing dialogue between two office colleagues, takes place on the stairs of the Hill Street Theatre. Immediately afterwards a man in a morning suit dashes through the gathered crowd and the audience are instructed to “Follow that groom”, which they do, out onto George Street and into a branch of a high street chain store. (On the way we pass a woman striding with purpose in a nurse’s uniform – she’s not part of it, but suddenly the potential for story is everywhere).
A second scene takes place on the shop-floor and then the audience – most relishing the adventure, though a few appear more than a little bemused by the whole experience – are led upstairs to the main performance space. The floor has been covered in turf and the walls are lined with deck-chairs and park-benches; a screen announces the title and location of each little scene.
A lonely woman makes one-sided small talk with a young delivery boy. Two drunk women discuss the aftermath of a night on the town in Newcastle. A nervy mother interrogates a man reading a book in a park. Two co-workers, one Muslim, one Christian, share a prayer room. A mother sits by her son’s hospital bed. The pieces are often very funny, but there’s a strong undercurrent of poignancy to many of them. The overriding theme is one of disconnect, cultural collision in miniature, attempts at communication that often fail and fall apart. A middle-aged man faces the sack for his preference for discussing things face-to-face rather than via email. An Asian daughter disappoints her mother. A weary kebab shop owner tries to decipher the demands of a boozy customer. The philosophy of the piece is encapsulated as two Glasgow street-cleaners pick over the litter in the park and imagine possible backstories for the discarded items: “sometimes you find a diamond.”
The three-person cast – Mark McDonnell, Taqi Nazeer, Pauline Taylor – are incredibly versatile, swapping accents with ease as they slide from story to story. Ros Philips’ production for the most part avoids descending into sketch show territory, and the characters rarely stray into caricature even when it might be easy to do so. The quick-fire nature of the piece begins to work against it after a while, some of the snippets fall flat and the bittiness of the piece becomes repetitious; the lack of a through-narrative becomes more glaring. But, taken together, there’s something compelling about the portrait of the country they create, one of cultural gulfs, but also of people attempting to reach out, to at least attempt to understand one another – ultimately the piece leaves you feeling quite hopeful.
