Theatre reviews: Wall of Death | Crunch | The Ching Room / The Moira Monologues

WALL OF DEATH – A WAY OF LIFE ****SECC, GLASGOWCRUNCH ***ORAN MOR, GLASGOWTHE CHING ROOM/THE MOIRA MONOLOGUES ****CITIZENS' THEATRE, GLASGOW

• The Wall of Death. The Ken Fox troupe go through their routine

THE smell of the Castrol, the roar of the crowd. If showmanship is a vital part of the theatre, then it follows that a company like the Ken Fox Troupe, the last family of Wall of Death riders in the UK, have something to teach us about the art of performance, and the risks it entails. The Glasgow-trained sculptor Stephen Skynka has been fascinated by the Wall of Death since childhood, the National Theatre of Scotland's director Vicky Featherstone instantly understood why; and hence the birth of the new NTS show Wall of Death – A Way of Life, which combines installation art, film and sound with the pure theatre of a 15-minute Ken Fox Troupe performance.

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The show begins with a chance to wander around a little fairground booth created by Skrynka; a beautiful, pink-lit island in the dark that explores the idea of rotation through dozens of tiny zoetrope toys revolving on old wind-up gramophones. We move towards the Wall of Death through a circle of filmed images of Skrynka beginning to learn the art of riding, and Ken Fox talking about it. Then there's a roar of thrilling sound, a theatrical flood of light from the side of a fairground truck, a chance to meet the four-strong troupe, and to hear their modest, sometimes intriguing answers to frequently asked questions about their art.

And then it's up into the Wall of Death itself, for 15 minutes of brilliant, searing showmanship from Fox and his young riders. Their poise, their calm, their perfect athleticism, as they drive their roaring bikes to the top of the vertical wall, soaring and swooping like dancers or acrobats, draws gasps of excitement from the audience, gathered in a circle around the top of the great drum.

Has Skrynka mastered the art of riding the Wall? No, he hasn't; he says that the learning process goes on.

But at the end of the evening, we still have plenty to celebrate and to think about. Since the show opened, a debate has opened up about whether this is the kind of project a National Theatre should embrace. Some argue for more revivals of conventional plays, and some cannot see what value Featherstone and Skrynka are adding to the work of the Ken Fox Troupe; in a sense, the debate echoes the one around conceptual art in the visual field.

The fact that this debate even exists, though, suggests that Featherstone's attitude to running a National Theatre is generating far more interest, and unleashing far more energy, than a more conventional approach. Anyone could have brought the Wall Of Death into the framework of theatre; but Featherstone was the conceptual artist who did it, and there is no doubt that this shift in context adds a huge new dimension to the ways in which the work of the Ken Fox Troupe is seen and discussed. And if we take seriously the 7:84 argument that most forms of conventional theatre in Britain are rejected by popular audiences as "not for them", then we should welcome Featherstone's efforts to explore and redefine the limits of the art-form for new times. Because exploration, in the end, is the essence of art; and with this imperfect but fascinating show, she demonstrates just how vibrant, and how thrilling, the process of discovery can sometimes be.

Conceptual theatre has also reached a long finger, this week, into the Play, Pie and Pint lunchtime season at Oran Mor, where gifted young performance artist Gary McNair offers a show – titled Crunch – that is part dramatic monologue, part off-the-cuff self-improvement lecture on the nature of money and its tyranny. This is hugely entertaining stuff, particularly when McNair goads the audience into bidding real cash for a sealed envelope of money, or putting their own ten-pound notes through a shredder. It remains, though, a show with a slightly tentative air. It knows where it's coming from, and what style it wants to satirise; but politically and dramatically, it's not sure where it's going.

There's no question of uncertainty, though, in the double-bill of powerfully written short plays by rising star Alan Bissett that opened in the Citizens' Theatre this week. The evening opens with a razor-sharp revival of The Ching Room, Bissett's haunting, half-comic 2009 piece about a strange encounter between a punter and a dealer in the gents' toilet of a Sauchiehall Street club.

It's Bissett's own performance of The Moira Monologues, though, that makes this double-bill a roaring theatrical success. Dressed in simple jeans and a sweater, Bissett steps into the light, and is instantly transformed into Moira Bell, queen of the Falkirk underclass, and one of the most charismatic characters to emerge in Scottish theatre this decade. In six short monologues, lasting just over an hour, Moira – in one-sided conversation with her best friend Babs – introduces us to her world, and to her life as a single mum, working as a school cleaner, and living in a the kind of scheme where other people's rottweilers are a constant threat.

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If Moira sounds like a single-parent clich, though, she soon establishes that she is anything but. She feels nothing but pity for the neurotic, aspirational middle classes; and she is nobody's fool when it comes to politics, although her sense of nationhood is full of typical and hilarious Caledonian contradictions. This is brilliant stuff, an exhilaratingly fresh take on the whole business of class and culture in Scotland. It's also so funny that some in the audience were literally shouting with laughter, over a character and a performance that will surely have a long continuing life after this week's brief run in Glasgow.

• Wall of Death is at the SECC, Glasgow until tomorrow; the AECC, Aberdeen, 15-17 February; and the Royal Highland Centre, Edinburgh, 20-28 February. Crunch and The Ching Room/Moira Monologues both run until 13 February.

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