Designed by Graham Johnston. Lighting by John Burns.
First performances at the Tron April 14th 1990.
Crow, Douglas Henshall: Crow, Peter Mullan: Singer, Julia Dow.
Production photographs : Alan Wylie
Mark Fisher at The Tron
Take the Muppet Show. Throw away Kermit and keep the minature music hall. Knock the vertical hold askew and slip into something surreal.
Behind the back of Glasgow's Tron theatre, a new 50-seat studio. The changing house has been sqeezed between a busy admin office and a walled garden. Like an Edinburgh Fringe mystery tour, the audience gathers in the Tron foyer to be ushered into uncharted territory. En route framed red and yellow paintings show bits of words and snatches of poetry, while Craig Armstrong's music rattles out of an outdoor tannoy.
Thus we enter the dark world of Crow. It's a vision belonging as much to director Michael Boyd as to Poet Laureate Ted Hughes, but each has an imaginatin worthy of the oter. The theatre is tiny- an Alice in Wonderland world where ideas grow extravagantly larger than life. This is backstage Blackpool where the familiar footlights, trapeze and gaudy red paint ease into an ever-shifting nightmare.
Michael Boyd's, masterstroke is to use Ted Hughes' 1972 apocalyptic poem cycle not as a straight-jacket, but as a springboard for his theatrical ambitions. Collaborating with actors Douglas Henshall and Peter Mullan, designer Graham Johnstone, singer Julia Dow and musician Craig Armstrong, the director draws inspiration from the working practices of performance art. Linear rather than dramatic, the production is a montage of image and sound, thoroughly theatrical, witty and compellingly original. Using about a third of Hughes' poems, some of which are projected onto the red velvet curtains, the performance follows the simplest of outline stories without introducing any new dialogue.
Douglas Henshall is Crow: an actor retiring backstage from his adoring audience to be confronted by an unfamiliar crowd in the Changing House where we are as uncertain of his purpose as he is. Comical dream edges into disturbing nightmare as Peter Mullan, his alter-ego, tempts and cajoles him into the darker recesses of the Crow psyche.
Mullan is the sort of a sleazy cabaret compere beloved by Neil Innes, or the doggedly uvuncular fellow drinker propping up the bar in your local. Henshall is his confused sidekick, naive, befuddled, anxious to please. Julia Dow appears, is given reverential treatment and, for the sake of variety sings a bleak song beautifully.
Agony is an ever-ringing telephone. Relief is a bottle of wine knocked back with fervour. In this theatre the magic works against the magician and likewise the audience is trapped in a claustrophobic auditorium where no rules apply. The extent of Boyd's imagination is thrilling- for him musical chairs are just that - and in Crow he has ensured a sure-fire hit for this year's Mayfest and a more worthy Scottish export to Moscow next autumn.