Review: The Red Hourglass

Four spiders and one hawk wasp are being kept by scientists under lab conditions. Alan Bissett, the author of the insect-personas, plays each of them in turn. Under the glare of prolonged houselights and of Bissett himself, the audience feels somewhat akin to the spectated creatures in captivity.

At times it seemed like a fun acting experiment, designed by Bissett for the purposes of flaunting his ability to scuttle from accent to accent, character to character, gender to gender, in a medley that T.S. might well have dubbed ‘he do the spider in different voices’. At other times, it seemed like a well-dramatized piece on the Discovery Channel, with monologues copied and pasted from Wikipedia pages on arachnoid behaviour.

The attempt to make the play topical was strained – ‘we big countries shouldn’t bully little countries like we humans bully spiders’, etc. A fair enough point to make, but each of the characters were so ridiculous and lacked so much psychological depth that the moral and/or political message was never fully realised.

This was especially true for the Black Widow. Neither entertaining nor believable as the sadistic nymphomaniac, the play’s lead was ill-equipped with an outdated, Tennessee Williams-esque drawl. A male portrayal through and through, this arachnid attracted neither sympathy nor respect from any who spied her.

The other characters however, were funny. Sometimes the accents would creep into unknown and previously uninhabited territories, but on the whole Bissett’s acting and delivery were solid. It’s just a shame that the comedic elements were occassionally lost in a web of confused ideas.

You can catch The Red Hourglass at the Byre until October 6th. And if you have seen it, and have had an entirely different interpretation of events, feel free to post a comment below.