Theatre reviews: The Maw Broon Monologues/10,000 Metres Deep/Antigone - Scotsman.com Living

Theatre reviews: The Maw Broon Monologues/10,000 Metres Deep/Antigone - Scotsman.com Living

Theatre reviews: The Maw Broon Monologues

Maw Broon, catching up after 60 years in limbo with everything the 21st century has to offer.

Date: 05 November 2009
By Joyce McMillan
THE MAW BROON MONOLOGUES ****
TRON THEATRE, GLASGOW

FOR a woman who first saw the light of day on 8 March 1936 – and was a lusty 50-year-old even then – the Sunday Post's great Scottish cartoon matriarch, Maw Broon, is looking in pretty good shape. She's not slim, she's not young, she's not braw; and as she comes to realise, in the course of The Maw Broon Monologues, a new Glasgay! Commission by Glasgow-born poet and playwright Jackie Kay, she isn't actually real.

For all her disadvantages, though, Maw Broon – as personified here by fabulous Terry Neason, and black alter ego Suzanne Bonnar – is all woman; and in Kay's weird, slightly mind-blowing tartan-tinged fantasy, she takes umbrage at Paw Broon's suspected infidelity, and sets off from her kitsch room-and-kitchen at No 10 Glebe Street to travel the world of the early 21st century, in search of the personal fulfilment she deserves.

Tartan shopping bag in hand, and headscarf tied firmly in place, she therefore visits a shrink, tries colonic irrigation, pines for a room of her own, wins through to round three of Scotland's Got Talent ("reality's no just on TV, ye know"), discusses the possible merits of a gay lifestyle, and generates her own version of the Vagina Monologues. And meantime, at the piano, the astonishing Tom Urie – in the character of Maw's unattractive bearded daughter, Daphne Broon – rattles out his own cycle of songs in which Neason and Bonnar celebrate or bewail Maw's fate, in styles ranging from Scottish country dance to serious blues; while a screen above the fireplace alternates between a sentimental Highland scene, and captioned texts in which the great philosophers of post-modernity offer their thoughts on the journey of the individual towards self-knowledge.

It has to be said that having set up this brilliant and hilarious scenario, Jackie Kay's 90-minute script doesn't quite develop the dramatic momentum of which it might have been capable. The relationship between the two Maw Broons is not clear; the idea of the black alter ego is not developed, and their conversation often dwindles into daytime television cliché. The show expresses no legible view about the self-obsessed individualism of our time; and it often slides into the easy comic option of setting up the old tenement stereotype, and then raising cheap laughs by conjuring up incongruities, like Maw Broon serving up sashimi.

But if the show sometimes lacks focus, and often tends to reinforce the stereotypes it sets out to challenge, it's also one of the most hilariously inventive investigations of Scottish kitsch culture to appear on stage since the 1980s. Maggie Kinloch's production fully exploits the postmodern madness of the material; Neason and Bonnar both sing beautifully, particularly when it comes to the blues. And Neason in particular sometimes seems like the very embodiment of a certain kind of Scottish womanhood – the hard-working, self-mocking kind for whom being a woman was never a matter of pride or joy, and who therefore needed the liberation brought by the strange, self-centred times we live in, as much as any group on earth.