THE DAY THE POPE EMPTIED CROY
Another lunchtime performance. Today's pie - curried lentil. With the usual pint of Traverse Ale as accompaniment.
In 1982 the Pope delivered a mass in a Glasgow park and around 250,000 people attended. The story goes that the town of Croy, a small Catholic community, was empty of people that day, all of them attending the mass.
Against that backdrop two teenagers have entered the empty Croy church, intent on stealing the chalice then running away south. One looks every inch the archetypal Glasgow ned, but who has a secret inner life, the other a punk who, it turns out, has received plenty of verbal and physical abuse for daring to be different in a very conservative society. They sniff glue, they attempt their theft, their dialogue reveals much to the audience about what is a very asymmetrical relationship, and they are very, very funny at times. Then a third character is revealed and the drama takes a much more sinister twist, leading us towards tragedy.
This is a play about the bigotry of conformity and the damage it inflicts on those perceived to be 'other'. It would have been near impossible to be an openly gay man in a town like Croy in the eighties. To do so risked persecution, not to do so meant twisting your own self to fit a norm you didn't belong to. This drama engages our sympathies for both choices.
There are some great lines. Not least when there's the suggestion that had the christian bible simply included some words explaining that homosexuality was perfectly natural it could have saved a lot of trouble for a lot of innocent people. My own favourite was the response to being informed that Jesus came from the Middle East -
"What? Grangemouth?"
(Apologies to non Lowland Scots to whom this joke will mean nothing!)
Forty five minutes flew by, this was one of the best PPPs I've seen.
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