Anyone out clubbing in Glasgow over the past few years - Arches included - will have undoubtedly noticed the little Chinese lady who goes around selling single roses to those in love. Well, to those inebriated actually, but red roses nevertheless - to complement those pounding red hearts. Yes, red truly is the colour of love.
But wait, eager though you may be to get your lumber home (the mouldy flower having done the trick), and having stood in that taxi queue for half an hour, pray that the driver does not go through a red traffic light. For red, as we also know, spells danger.
Of all the colours in the spectrum, none has quite the clash of connotations as red. And it is this conflict that Edinburgh-based Boilerhouse explore in their new, appropriately clubby, production - and do so with the energy of arcing electricity.
Director Paul Pinson has taken excerpts of text from a number of contributors and assembled a montage of sound and imagery. (With a fine musical score from
Quee MacArthur.)
There is no narrative as such, though the disparate moments do have an a elliptical shape to them: like the young woman who gets her heart first broken aged four in the nursery sandpit and is still splinting the fracture as a grown-up.
The cast of six are polished and funny and sexy - though it would not appear to help them hang on to relationships going by this account. Rose-tinted spectacles are obviously not what they used to be.
There are no new insights into love and desire - just snatches of conversation really, overheard perhaps in any club or taxi queue, but fashioned into something with style.
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