Wooden Oh! The Wall of Death riding is great but the NTS have not added anything to it
You’ll have seen the Ken Fox Troupe of motorcycle wall of death riders; they are the ones on that circular BBC1 station ident. They are a lovely family, the last surviving relic in the UK of a tradition which goes back almost a century. When Ken’s two good-looking sons, Alex and Luke (the latter not yet old enough to ride a motorbike on a public road) and Alex’s pretty girlfriend Kerri, ride in line abreast, one above the other, around the vertical wooden wall, you would have to be dead not to feel a surge of raw excitement.
So if you ever get the chance – they work almost all the year round at shows, steam rallies exhibitions and so on – do go and see them. It will cost you £2.50 for about 15 minutes of high octane entertainment.
That’s slightly longer than you get for your £10 in this misbegotten blind alley up which the National Theatre of Scotland (NTS) seem to have been led by the artist Stephen Skrynka. For the other hour here, you get a halting introduction from Skrynka about his enthusiasm for the world of the "Wall of Death", a charming but irrelevant little sideshow of zoetropes built by him and Jim Le Fevre (the only connection being that the shape of the classic zoetrope echoing that of the wall of death), a brief video of Skrynka trying, and failing, to learn how ride the wall, and a question and answer session with the family.
This has apparently required the professional services of no fewer than eleven credited people, not counting the Fox family and their own technicians, including the director of the NTS herself. Quite what this panoply of experts bring to the show is hard to see.
Let’s not get bogged down in unanswerable “What is theatre” or “What is drama” questions – though, just for the record, in my book, this event constituted neither. More important is that whether you are a ticket buyer or a tax-payer contributing to the NTS's substantial public subsidy, this is, to put it at its mildest, a poor return on your money.
The unique structure of the NTS allows it to bill itself as a “theatre without walls”. Its determination to live up to that has led to exciting work in places and with people that leave other national theatres looking dowdy and pedestrian. It's a pity, now that they have introduced a wall, that it had to be as deadly as this.
Wall of Death – A Way of Life at the SECC, Glasgow until Feb 12, and then touring to Aberdeen and Edinburgh until Feb 28; details at www.nationaltheatrescotland.com
