Theatre reviews: Feel_Good | Six The Musical

Feel_Good, Oran Mor, Glasgow ★★★★

Six, Festival Theatre, Edinburgh ★★★★

Even tough times, the right to fail in Scottish theatre is alive and well at the Play, Pie, Pint seasons at Oran Mor, where some shows are great, and others clearly still finding their way.

Every now and then, though, A Play, A Pie And A Pint produces a show that hits the jackpot, first time round; and last week’s play Feel_Good, by award-winning Glasgow-based writer-performer Amy Conway, was one of them. Inspired by Laura Bates’s book The New Age Of Sexism – and in similar vein to Corinne Salisbury’s recent Fringe First winning smash-hit Slayers – it explores the horrifying new worlds of exploitative possibility opened up by the collision between artificial intelligence and online porn culture, now so deeply entrenched in our society.

It begins as what seems like a light-touch sex comedy, with a hung-over Henry – 30-ish, bored, unhappily single – waking up to the sound of his doorbell, and the arrival of a scantily clad replica version of his much-mourned ex-girlfriend Liz, complete with her own remote control panel.

Henry has apparently ordered this substitute Liz while too drunk to know what he was doing; and while he is appalled, he also finds himself increasingly fascinated by the complexity of the new Liz’s setting controls, which enable him to reduce annoying aspects of her personality, and generally construct a Liz to suit himself.

The problem is, though, that the more this new Liz learns about the breakdown of their original relationship, and the more she starts to resemble the real Liz, the more rebellious she becomes; and the play spirals towards a horrifying conclusion, in which the real Liz is confronted both with her artificial self, and with what Henry has done, in a world ever more adept at enabling apparently “nice” men to live out their chilling fantasies of control and dominance.

In Ben Standish’s breathlessly absorbing production, Henry and the various forms of Liz are played by Sam Stopford and Anna Russell Martin with such brilliance that sparks sometimes seem to fly from the stage; and although this terrific Play, Pie, Pint drama has no future life planned for now, it would be something of a real-world tragedy if it is not seen again soon, in Scotland and beyond.

Six The Musical

The musical Six is another show that found its mark instantly, back on the Edinburgh Fringe of 2017; and today Toby Marlow and Lucy Moss’s super-clever rock-concert reimagining of the story of Henry VIII’s six wives is a global hit on a breathtaking scale, now visiting Edinburgh as part of an autumn tour that also includes half a dozen cities in China.

Created in the “me-too” moment of the late 2010s, Six imagines the six wives (divorced, beheaded, died, divorced, beheaded, survived) as a take-no-prisoners girl group – backed by a fine all-female four-piece band – who begin by competing for the title of most abused queen; but eventually learn the value of female solidarity, in holding their often murderous royal husband to account.

READ MORE: Kash Arshad on directing East is East at the Citz: 'It still feels so relevant and so true'

The music ranges brilliantly across different styles of contemporary pop, from torch-song ballad (Laura Dawkes’s ever-loving Jane Seymour) to German techno (Hannah Victoria’s gleeful Anne of Cleves, retired to Richmond with a palace and a fortune); the 15th century setting offers huge scope for the show’s fantastic Tudor-punk costume designs, all bejewelled sparkle and startling regal outlines.

And if the company who delivered the show with such wit, flair and feeling in Edinburgh last week have now bowed out, to be replaced for the autumn tour, this show is now such an unfailingly well-made and witty piece of global theatre that we can be sure it will roll triumphantly on; capturing an upbeat moment in the history of female empowerment that has now been partly eclipsed, but is still worth celebrating, in all its angry and irrepressible glory.

​Feel_Good, run completed. Six is at the Festival Theatre, Edinburgh, until 26 September; Theatre Royal, Glasgow, 29 September until 3 October; and Eden Court Theatre, Inverness, 6-10 October.

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