LAMPLIGHTER at the TRON GLASGOW

In conjunction with the Commonwealth Games there have been various cultural , artistic and musical festivals all around the city with the theme of Home Nations Festival with stories of all the nations of the Commonwealth coming "home" to tell their stories for all to share and take back to their homes.

One such performance was Jackie Kays The Lamplighter which took the audience on a journey through the dark heart of triangular trade of weapons ,slavery and sugar/tobacco. it features four women and a man tell the story beginning with the anguished tale of an eleven year old girl , the hideous perils of transportation in slave ships, the harrowing life on the plantations, and the genuine dark heart of the  growth of the British cities and the industrial revolution.

This Guardian article by the author gives the background research taken by the author
 in writing the play.

"I belong to Glasgow, dear old Glasgow town, but, alas, there is something the matter with Glasgow that's going round and round. Glasgow does not readily admit its history in the way that other cities in the United Kingdom have done - Bristol, Liverpool, London. Other cities are holding major events to commemorate the abolition. What's happening in Glasgow? - in the Gallery of Modern Art, for instance, which was originally Cunninghame Mansion, built in 1778, the splendid townhouse of William Cunningham, a tobacco baron? Or in Buchanan Street, the great shopping street, named after Andrew Buchanan, another tobacco lord, or in Jamaica Street, Tobago Street, the Kingston Bridge?
At school, I was taught about the industrial revolution, but not about the slave trade which financed and powered it. I was taught about the suffragettes, but not about the women abolitionists who came before them, and who went on to become them. Jane Smeal set up the Glasgow Ladies Emancipation Society in the 1830s. And as early as 1792, 13,000 Glasgow residents put their name to a petition to abolish slavery. I never learnt, for instance, that the movement to end slavery in the British Empire in the 18th century is probably the first human rights campaign in history."

In this video Jackie Kay discusses the history of six of her poems selected as part of the Scottish Set Text list for National 5 English.

EDWIN MORGAN DREAMS & OTHER NIGHTMARES at the TRON GLASGOW

Tron Theatre Artistic director states " Edwin Morgan's Dreams & Other Nightmares – Liz Lochhead's play about her friend
and fellow poet Edwin Morgan first appeared at Glasgay! in 2011, a year after
Morgan's death aged ninety. Set in a care home and based around conversations
with Morgan's biographer, Lochhead uses this a jumping off point to look at
Morgan's life as a gay man living a private life beyond his poetry in a vivid
eighty minutes of memory, imagination and poetic longing."

According to the description "Edwin Morgan’s last room in a nursing home in the West End of Glasgow.  Everything’s reduced to the barest essentials, just a bed, a wheelchair and a desk.  On a dark ordinary Friday afternoon in winter, middle-aged James, the poet’s biographer, friend and helper, there to do routine admin with the frail eighty seven year old, hears this urgent question from a deeply disturbed Morgan, who then recounts a series of vivid dreams, nightmares in fact, which have been disturbing him.
Images, poems, remembered lovers, regrets, rough trade, propositions accepted or avoided, truths, desires and lives surround the bed.  James, the listener, is disturbed too, trapped in his task like a reluctant interpreter/psychiatrist/amateur Freudian."

This review is from The Scotsman Newspaper from when the play originally came out earlier in the decade.

"The scene is a Glasgow care-home where Morgan lay dying, in the last year of his life; the key relationship is the one between Morgan and his friend and biographer, a fictional version of the real-life James McGonigal. Morgan feels he cannot write any more, but is suddenly assailed by three vivid and terrifying dreams. He clutches at James, and asks whether he thinks it possible that “a person could live two utterly different lives, without either self being aware of the other?”
Out of that central thought, Lochhead weaves a complex 80 minutes of memory, imagination, conversation, and poetry, in which Davie McKay plays both a lovable Morgan and – with less success – a cheeky, streetwise character who represents the poet’s “life force”. Part tribute to the intensity of a homosexual life that spanned the ages of secrecy and openness, part powerful reflection on Morgan’s modernity and restlessness, and part loving portrait of a city with its own double lives, Lochhead’s play is as rich as it is memorable; and even in its most awkward moments, the three actors – including Lewis Howden as the biographer, and Steven Duffy as a series of lovers – deliver it with a passion and care that speaks volumes, not least about the love that surrounds the immortal memory of Edwin Morgan."

The video below is the "Off The Page" programme featuring Edwin Morgan discussing his childhood and what , for him , was a bad period for Western Poetry post-war.
 

UNDER MILK WOOD at the TRON GLASGOW

Originally written , though never fully adapted , as a play this piece became more famous as a radio audio drama which itself was never adapted as Dylan Thomas passed away before he could return from a sojourn in America before he could complete the job.Thereafter the challenge has always been to get something that only partially translate to the stage in a way the audience can relate to and to bring drama to a radio play which has no grounding tempo.Yet , this can be seen as a metaphor for the lives of ordinary People so the lack of direction and action becomes the unfulfilled drama of the piece itself.

As the review below from the Glasgow Herald states this staging was one of the better ones in which the only real star of the drama , the poetic words of Dylan himself , take centre stage in the tale that is as gladdening as it seems to be humdrum in the time in which it was written with the world settling into a stand-off cold war with the petrifying horrors of the atomic bomb and the slow recovery from WW2 with rations barely returning to pre-war levels still being a concern for the ordinary communities of the emerging post-war world.

" Nicholls takes full advantage of the Tron Community Company's resources to put quaking flesh on the rich bones of Thomas's big, rambunctious symphony of inner yearning, shattered dreams and hidden hopes that the play evolves into.
With the narrator's lines split three ways between the bar staff of Charlotte Lane's wood-lined howf, the rest of the townsfolk either prop up the bar or else sit in repose at a floor of tables until they spring into life to lay bare their hearts desires."