Presented by Lung Ha Theatre Company
Ssssh!
No, but seriously Sssssssh!
A sponsored silence is on; so whatever you do you have to keep it zipped, keep it buttoned, keep it together – even when one of the group is doing all she can to break you down.
And how can you, could anyone, stay silent when one of the team has just won wads of cash; and what about those builders who just keep popping in and out, surely something has to be said to them?
Renowned playwright Douglas Maxwell, composer MJ McCarthy and the Lung Ha Theatre Company performers take you on a (quiet) journey where silence is golden – but there are many ways to overcome silence when there is just so much to be said.
Tron Theatre, Glasgow: 01 & 02 April 2016
Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh: 07 – 09 April 2016
The Silent Treatment
Reviews
Pivoting around this is a blossoming romance, a quintet of bowler-hatted builders and a game of pass the parcel with the broken head of a religious statue.Maria Oller’s jaunty production capitalises on the sheer ridiculousness of Maxwell’s set-up by navigating her twenty-strong ensemble led by Nicola Tuxworth and Emma Clark as Billie and Stacey through all this on Jessica Brettle’s set with prat-falling knockabout glee. This is aided hugely by a musical score by MJ McCarthy that bubbles under the action throughout, and which sounds part silent movie, part 1970s sit-com. While chattier than advertised, Maxwell’s script fizzes with invention and a playfulness that speaks volumes in a way that words can’t always muster.
Neil Cooper – The Herald
Cue 55 minutes of well-choreographed comic chaos, in Maria Oller’s production, as the silence become the pretext for all kinds of antics, from a whole riff based on one of the group finding a lucrative winning scratch-card in his pocket, through a collapsing wall crucifix with a decapitated Jesus, to the apparent arrival of a noisy team of builders. There’s slapstick, situation comedy, a touch of tragedy, a final twist of cheesy romance; and if the overall effect is fragmented, and sometimes more like a series of exercises in silent comedy than a play in its own right, this latest show still provides an enjoyable showcase for the ever-more-impressive skills of the Lung Ha ensemble, rising joyfully to the notoriously difficult challenge of tightly-timed physical comedy, and making a persuasive job of it, at every outrageous turn.
Joyce McMillan – The Scotsman