The Lonely Clouds of Guernica

The Lonely Clouds of Guernica

By Justin MacGregor

Come As You Arts North West

The Lowry, 10 November 2011

The title is an unlikely conflation of Wordsworth and Picasso, the play itself a moving meditation on the costs of war.

David Crowley plays Ben, a soldier suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), and it is his story that is told.  In the main, it’s a story of sacrifice, expiation and renewal.

What impresses most about this play especially – though it’s true also of the triliogy taken as a whole – is its ambition.  It is allusive, rich with meaning, and its complex, multilayered narrative uses all the space on the stage.  MacGregor makes demands on the audience, but any and all effort is rewarded.  Both Wordsworth and Picasso make an appearance, as does another famous or infamous personage, who’s finally unmasked (or ‘unburkaed’) at the end.  There’s humour here too, as for example in the droll recital of the side effects of anti-PTSD drugs by a certain Dr. Phizer (Peter Hunt).  Of the many fine performances, Anthony Quinlan’s was the pick for me.  He played George, a private writing home.

This is a very different play to, say, either Motherland by Steve Gilroy or Judith Thompson’s Palace of the End, two plays that also dealt with the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq, but it deserves to be mentioned in the same breath as them.  It’s that good.

The Lonely Clouds of Guernica is at The Lowry until 12 November, details here.

God Wept and the Devil Laughed

God Wept and the Devil Laughed
By Justin MacGregor
Come As You Arts North West
The Lowry, 15 July 2011

This is a play possessing plenty of light and shade, comedy and sorrow.

Even though we take in the horrors of war and genocide, and the living that must inevitably take place afterwards, there are still some laughs and lighter moments along the way.

The language often takes poetic flight and soars and there are a few ethereal scenes where the fallen dead speak to the still living.  I enjoyed all the performances, but David Crowley’s impish Lewis was probably my favourite, if I had to pick one.

One crucial correction: it was stated in the sermon at the beginning that the reading was taken from Solomon.  This is clearly wrong; it was from Ecclesiastes, chapter 3.

Well, anyway, a fine play.

God Wept and the Devil Laughed is at The Lowry until 17 July, some details being  here.  And a website devoted to the play is here.

The Play That Killed Me

The Play That Killed Me
By Justin MacGregor
The Lowry, 23 September 2010

Marlene Dietrich with Hector MacGregor on the set of Stage Fright (1950), as Alfred Hitchcock directs. Credit: Warner Brothers

The story of the playwright’s grandfather, Hector: a man who, it is clear, touched many other people’s lives.

It covers a number of years of Hector’s life and is therefore quite compressed in parts; the emphasis is on Hector’s service in North Africa during World War Two, where he put on plays for the eighth army, Monty’s men.

Gerry Mclaughlin is terrific as the lead, Hector being in large part the narrator of his own story.  All the cast hold their end up well, mind, and Peter Hunt’s Lewis provided welcome flashes of humour.  His rank yo-yoed regularly; now three stripes, now two.

As you watch the play, Rossetti’s famous lines (‘What man has bent over his son’s sleep to brood’, etc.) may come unbidden into your mind.  A moving experience, and quite unexpected.