From the Glasgow stage, we present...

Just back from Student Theatre At Glasgow's production of Cinders; mah-juck! (as we say in Glasgow, dear).

Since my small readership aren't in a position to go and see it, I won't dwell on the details of the production over-much and will merely say that everybody excelled: the stars, the small roles (but!, I hear you cry, there are no small roles; quite right, of course), the tech, the music, the make-up people (everybody was gaunt and blear-eyed, *shiver*...); everything clicked together so precisely, in such an intimate space, that it became very difficult to consider the play as a production at all. So I won't! You come here for the Dark Forests of the Slavic Soul.

The play concerns a girls' reform school in 50s Poland: a film-crew are making a documentary around a production of 'Cinderella' by these hardened - or apparently hardened - juvies. I wondered early on whether time and place particularly mattered - I knew that the playwright was Polish, but not the context in which he'd written it - and whether you couldn't have put the same story in a similar institution in, say, Ireland. But somewhere in the second act I knew this wasn't the case, and the reason why hit me during the applause. Indulge me a reading: this is only looking at a very complex work from one angle, of course, but I like it. After a year of squeezing texts in medieval instruments of torture to yield up thematic life-blood, its nice when a thesis just hits you. I shall try and avoid spoiling.

The setting is very low-key: a bored party official we only see at the start, short references to the war, 'Ah... only before socialism...'. And indeed the play makes fun of the direct approach to making horror out of totalitarianism, and at the people who fall for it: '"Hitler shot my father and laughed as he did it", I can't use that!' get's a guilty laugh. This is a very self-conscious play all through, and it takes a bloody good playwright and an equally good production to squeeze your bleeding heart with a play about the dangers of squeezing bleeding hearts. But it triumphs, and as the boundaries of the play-within-the-play break down, so do those of the outer play until in the last scene people wanted to jump onto the stage and do something, dammit.

But I realised at the end that, although you probably could have the same characters and events in any country, they'd signify something quite different. Here we see very different two men - a teacher and the film-director, the latter idealistic to the point of fury and the former tragicomically neurotic - who have both become so obsessed with creating something that it's become more important than the mere humans caught up in it. And in the end, as will inevitably happen, losing sight of the harm they're doing for principles makes them lose sight of principles as well. We are in fact witnessing the story of communism in the 20th century.

Anyway, go and see it if you ever get the chance. Of course it won't be as good as STAG's: nothing ever is (at least before socialism).