Showing @ Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh, Thu 14 – Sun 17 April
Platform 18 is a new work award, run by The Arches in Glasgow to encourage Scotland’s best emergent theatre-makers by offering them a unique opportunity to stage a fully funded production at both The Arches and at Edinburgh’s Traverse Theatre. In this double bill, Platform 18 showcases this year’s two winners.
First up is Clare Duffy with Money…The Game Show, performed by Brian Ferguson and Pauline Lockhart as two former bank employees. Duffy explores what money is worth using the actual money she won from the Platform 18 Award in the form of six thousand pound coins, with a promise of plenty of audience participation and games to explore the risk-taking and silliness in moving and investing money. This is a very current production, perfectly timed with the recent banking crisis, the recession and the coalition government’s drastic austerity measures.
The second performance is of Gareth Nicholls’ Pause with a Smile, performed by Gary McNair and Kieran Hurley, who together tell true stories about incredible coincidences. Take the story of the farmer’s wife who lost her wedding ring, only to find it forty years later inside a potato – or the one about Martha whose first three husbands were all killed by lightning. As the show’s name suggests, Nicholls wants the audience to stop and smile as we consider the possibilities of these extraordinarily unlikely things that happen every day.
With such relevant, fun and amusing ideas on show, Platform 18 is a production event not to be missed.