| 19 August 2009
Traverse @ The Barony
7-31 August (ex. 14,15,21,22,28.29) 15.00
Handy if you can get a bar to close for an hour each day during your run: it makes for the most realistic of sets. Punters benefit too: your drink order sits on the table, ready to pick up and sip as you find your bar stool, vaguely aware of the piano man accompanying your entrance.
So begins an hour of sexually charged, vigorous action depicting the self-destructive, self-obsessed, drink-fuelled romances of barflies. Ben Harrison has taken Charles Bukowski’s drunken stories from LA and put them in his local, given the lead an Edinburgh accent, and somehow made what seems at heart, an American tale (I would have placed it in New York, but stand corrected), ours.
The force of this production is startling. As the actors use the bar as a climbing frame as much as a prop, they evoke characters with such conviction, particularly in the case of Gail Watson who plays a host of different women, that they had the audience spell bound, barely touching their free drinks.
Swinging from despair to humour, from classic blues on the piano to blue movie beats, and from a harrowingly secular suicide to the surreal (our hero, if we can call him that, is reduced to six inches by the ‘witch’ he marries, to be used as a sex toy), the play ranges wildly while the action is deliberately confined to the almost foetal enclosure that is the bar.
Wherever you’re from, make The Barony your local for the afternoon.
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