Gagarin
Way by Gregory Burke
Review
by Kate McCabe
A
Traverse Theatre on Tour Production
At
the Citizen’s Theatre Glasgow until 5th October
In
the Fife coalfield on Scotland’s chilly East coast, streets are named
after Soviet heroes and the villages returned a Communist Party MP to
Parliament right up until the 1950s. But by the 1980s, the mining industry
is destroyed and the red Kingdom of Fife has become a wasteland. In
the 1990s, the existential question “why are we here” has become real,
not metaphorical, for the tough working class men of Gagarin Way.
Such
zones of destruction exist all over the developed world, from Leipzig,
East Germany to Geary, Indiana to Krakow, Poland. Not surprising then
that this first play by this young Scottish writer has become a world-wide
phenomenon, with performances in France, Germany, Poland, and plans
for a film version.
In
these destroyed zones, the real work of cutting coal or building ships
has been replaced by ephemeral activities, like assembling parts made
somewhere else for machines to be sold somewhere else. Workers have
an almost illusory relationship to the product of their labour.
Jobs
are temporarily conjured into existence by omniscient global corporations
and magicked away again just as quickly. There used to be transient
workers moving round in search of work; now the worker stays put and
the jobs come and go in response to mysterious and apparently arbitrary
forces.
In
a parts assembly factory somewhere in Fife, two of these super-alienated
workers decide to force a face-to-face challenge on the faceless corporation
that employs them. Gary, a one-time shop steward, is now attracted to
the role of the lone incendiary who by a single dramatic act will fire
others to revolt. He is goaded to action by Eddie, a dangerous nihilist for whom philosophy
is not so much a guide to action as a licence to kill. Tom is the bemused
onlooker, who might disagree with the extremism of his colleagues but
whose wet liberalism can’t challenge it.
Gary
and Eddie want to give the distant Corporation a human face but it proves
harder than they expect to get to grips with entities who are always
somewhere else.
Gregory
Burke was born and brought up in Fife and when he wrote this, his first
play, he says he wanted to “write something about the Twentieth Century….about
economics, the dominant (only?) theme in modern politics and the source
of real power in these globalised times ….and finally about men and
our infinite capacity for self-delusion”.
He
certainly shows the self-delusion of thinking that individual shock
tactics can challenge globalisation. Anarchism in practice seems hopelessly
childish and the result of nihilism is exactly nothing - a bleak and
terrible nothing in this case. But in the end the ideas espoused by
all four of the protagonists seem woefully inadequate for the challenges
of the 21st Century.
The
only thing to be said in favour of a nihilistic time is that it can’t
persist – for nothing is always replaced by something. What to replace
it with is the question left hanging in the air by this superb play
of ideas and action. Ensemble acting of an incredibly high standard
from Billy McElhaney, Michael Moreland, John Stahl and Paul Thomas Hickey
- and great stage and lighting design make this a performance not to
be missed. The tradition of political theatre in Scotland, championed
down the years by the late John McGrath and others, is alive and well
and still tackling the subjects that matter.
You
still have time to catch it at the Citizen’s Theatre in Glasgow up until
5 October.
Traverse
Theatre www.traverse.org.uk
Citizens Theatre www.citz.co.uk
