WHAT'S in a name? Quite a lot in culture city, it would seem. Even spaces have names now. Gone are the days when performance areas were known as ''theatres.'' Such a name would impose linguistic limitations on what might be specific to the site, right? We seek the enigmatic and the acronymic.
Thus it is that the new studio theatre -- sorry, upstairs performance space --at the Tron shall be known as The Changing House. Utilising what used to be known as The Wardrobe -- turfed out across the street -- the new space will be hanselled by Michael Boyd's adaptation of Ted Hughes's poem Crow from tonight.
Impressed by the work the Third Eye's Nikki Milligan has done in bringing performance art to a larger audience, Boyd looked to creating something quintessentially Western to take to Moscow as his end of the exchange bargain set up by the New Beginnings Soviet arts season.
Crow deals with that seminal journey into the depths of the humanist soul that was mapped out by Conrad in Heart of Darkness. He is portrayed by Douglas Henshall and Peter Mullan with music by Craig Armstrong, whose work spans the serious and the popular.
Armstrong is joined by vocalist Julia Dow and percussionist Kirk Richardson. The space has been adapted by the designer Graham Johnston, who also designed the sets for Iain Heggie's Clyde Nouveau and Peter Arnott's Losing Alec for the Tron company.
Hitting the small-time .
The Herald - 14 Apr 1990
* THEATRE in a wardrobe comes to Glasgow's Tron with the production of Crow, a performance work based on the Ted Hughes sequence of poems From the Life and Songs of the Crow. Crow is a two-man show with words and music devised by Tron artistic director Michael Boyd and the wardrobe is where it's at -- a new studio created in the space where the Tron's upstairs wardrobe used to be, now called the Changing House. It is minuscule, seating fewer than 50 people, and Crow is the opening production. In his adaptation for the stage, Boyd -- who describes Hughes's sombre work as part-gothic and part-surrealistic nightmare -- has selected about a third of the original text, with no additional dialogue. He has set the piece in the framework of a tatty Victorian music hall, using an element of comedy as a distorting lens. The music is by Craig Armstrong. ''This gothic dream play,'' says the Tron publicity, ''follows the journey of an actor and his meeting with his double and alter ego, Crow.'' (Douglas Henshall is the actor and Peter Mullan- is Crow). The production plays on into Mayfest, and later in the year it will be taken to Russia, where Boyd has strong professional connections. Crow opened on Saturday.
16 Apr 1990