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GAGARIN WAY. By Gregory Burke. Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh, Scotland. 1-25 August 2001.
With Gagarin Way, Scottish theatre has become sufficiently inventive and universal to attract notice on the world stage. Despite the performers' heavy dialects and all sorts of jokes lamenting regional food and climate, this play is more than just an exercise in local color. As Scottish playwrights have been doing for decades, Gregory Burke overturns notions of a quaint, Brigadoonesque Scotland and instead creates a modern industrial setting infused with the terrors of rampant consumerism and modern day masculinities that could easily be set anywhere in the West. Burke's articulate ninety-minute play addresses issues of anarchism, Marxist and Hegelian theory, the crisis in masculinity, and the futility of both the fortyhour work week and the individual political act - no small feat for a first time playwright. [After its run at the Edinburgh Festival and England's Royal National Theatre, Gagarin Way transferred to London's West End in March 2002. Ed.]
In this pessimistic comedy Gagarin Way, two disillusioned factory workers kidnap and ultimately execute an upper-management type because they have deluded themselves into thinking that they can change the course of capitalist history. Exhausted family man Gary wants to get his antiglobalization message across to the populace, while self-educated tough-guy Eddie engages in violence and political terrorism more as a recreational experiment. Burke adds to the fracas Tom, an idealistic security guard who has just graduated from university with a degree in politics, and Frank, a world-weary big businessman, and creates a volatile cocktail of seething masculinities and...