Working out of the back room of a funky bar in the south side of Glasgow, Graham de Banzie and Alex Cox have been doing their best to keep intimate theater alive in their home city. For the past three years, the partners have been mounting bi-monthly original stage works in the back room of the Glad Café, in front of audiences ranging from 20–60 people. Always Look on the Dark Side of Life, their latest collaboration, is a typical production. De Banzie, a talented singer/guitarist, kicks things off with a couple of folk songs, then introduces the five actors. Working with scripts in hands, they play various characters in a series of short plays written by de Banzie and Cox. The plays are comic and satirical, except for a brief sketch in which a man argues with his conscience over whether he’s done the ethical thing by agreeing to pull the plug on a dying friend’s life-support system. In Act One’s strongest play, a husband gets his comeuppance when a cruel practical joke he has pulled on his wife backfires with vengeful results. Act Two is composed of a 40-minute play (by Cox) which lampoons the behavior of two married couples at a ghastly, petit-bougeois dinner party. Performed with minimal lighting and staging, Always Look rises above its limitations and works well, thanks to its youthful and spirited cast – and to some sharply irreverent writing by de Banzie and Cox.
