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If you were the gambling kind, you would have hedged your bets on A Play, a Pie and a Pint. What chance of survival would a lunchtime theatre have, especially one committed to staging 30 new plays a year, not to mention throwing in food and drink for the price of a ticket? But survive it has. On the go since 2004, the company has become a Glasgow West End institution.
You can see why Jemima Levick, its former artistic director, thought it worth bringing some of its hits with her now she has taken over at the Tron. Studio3 is a three-play compendium, each seen individually or as an all-day marathon, given handsome new productions that star a quick-witted trio of actors: Jo Freer, Dani Heron and Kevin Lennon.
There is nothing to link them beyond the chipboard surfaces of Kenny Miller’s sets, which grow from cool austerity (Isla Cowan’s Alright Sunshine) to red-white-and-blue vulgarity (Meghan Tyler’s Fleg) to neurotic interior chaos (Frances Poet’s Fruitcake). That, and the sense you can cover a surprising amount of ground in an hour.
That is certainly the case in Alright Sunshine, which starts as an Edinburgh answer to Under Milk Wood and ends as a powerful critique of patriarchal oppression. Cowan’s monologue is about Nicky, a police officer who keeps a discreet eye over the Meadows, the city-centre park where, as the day progresses, joggers give way to dog walkers, students, exercisers and drunks.
In Debbie Hannan’s crisp production, Heron navigates superbly from Cowan’s amusing roll call of social types to a deeper line about male coercion, control and violence. Nicky is at once the obedient daughter, following her father’s orders not to act like a girl; the motherly law-enforcer, keeping tempers in check with a kindly demeanour; and the potential victim, a lone woman walking in an area with a history of sexual assault. As playwright, Cowan packs a breezy comedy with polemical rage.
Heron makes an abrupt switch in Fleg (the east Belfast pronunciation of flag) in which she appears as the sexualised projection of a loyalist’s love of queen and country. Like a pole dancer togged up in Geri Halliwell’s Brit awards dress, she has a dominatrix hold over Lennon’s Bobby, whose patriotism is fuelled by self-destructive fury.
Like a turbo-charged David Ireland play, Tyler’s comedy has a cartoonish swagger, brought out by Dominic Hill’s boisterous production. The boozy Bobby is a sort of Ulster unionist Homer Simpson, while his wife, the Marge-like Caroline, is played by Freer with equal abrasiveness. It is a ferocious and funny broadside against intolerance.
Funny too is Poet’s Fruitcake, previously known as The Prognostications of Mikey Noyce, in which Holly (Freer) discovers her old friend Mikey (Lennon) has not left the house since lockdown for fear of his Nostradamus-style predictions.
His gnomic prophesies are wildly open to interpretation (or are they?), but play into our desire to control the future, avoid grief and escape regret. Levick’s production has a claustrophobic pandemic energy, wrapping up an idiosyncratic trilogy with a punch.
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At the Tron theatre, Glasgow, until 16 May
