reviews

THE SCOTSMAN (5 Stars)

BLOWN AWAY BY WAVE POWER

Somewhere near the start of Standing Wave, a strange and wonderful new play about the life and work of Delia Derbyshire, this unlikely heroine begins to talk to us, in character, about how you can totally disrupt the human expectation of sound by the simple device of playing a piece of audio tape backwards.
Derbyshire was the quiet woman from the BBC Radiophonic Workshop who, in 1963, created the arrangement of the Dr Who theme, along with a whole new world of other possibilities in electronic sound; and here, she is explaining to us how a backwards sound immediately sounds eerie and disturbing to our ears, because it begins with the sound of its decay and then moves towards the explosion of energy at its beginning. It’s something like this, roughly speaking, that happens in Nicola McCartney’s brilliant study of Derbyshire, subtitled: ‘Delia Derbyshire in the 1960s’, and written for the Tron theatre and young Glasgow co-producers Reeling & Writhing.
The play begins in 1974, at a subdued and problematic moment in Derbyshire’s life, when she had left the BBC and contracted a brief and disastrous marriage to a striking Yorkshire miner. At only 37, she was beginning the long battle with alcohol and depression that would shadow the remaining three decades of her life. For the first 45 minutes of a show which runs for just under two hours, there’s hardly a note of her own music to be heard, just the odd fragment here and there, as the older Delia, beautifully played by Abigail Davies, watches her relatively poised younger self (an excellent Luisa Prosser) at work in the BBC, and speaks to us in long monologues against a backdrop of dead silence…
To say this is a high-risk opening, in other words, is an understatement; in fact, it gives the strong impression that we’re in for a terrible evening, wordy, shapeless and depressing. But as the action gathers pace in its journey backwards through the early 1970s and into the 1960s, the sheer power of the concept begins to make itself felt, and then to exert a tremendous, poignant force. As scene follows scene, announced by little telling fragments from contemporary BBC news bulletins, the musical texture of the piece grows richer and richer, reflecting the response to Delia’s work of an eight strong group of young contemporary composers led by Pippa Murphy, until finally, the two Delias become one again and we are back at that glorious moment in 1963, when it all came together and began, and also - of course - started to decay.
The result is not only a clever, moving and beautifully structured play about Derbyshire, but also a brilliant, ground-breaking theatrical exploration of that great 1960s moment itself, of the huge explosion of youthful energy and radical art that transformed the lives of thousands, if not millions, of young people, but then left them at a long weary loss for any experience that could match the white-hot energy of their youth. In the end, the sheer boldness, humanity and historical force of what McCartney, her director Katherine Morley, and the whole company have achieved here fairly takes the breath away; not because it’s an attractive show at first glance, but because for those who stick with it, it’s the kind that makes you feel the earth move a little under your feet.

Joyce McMillan 13 Oct 04

THE GUARDIAN (4 Stars)

Your average play hits its peak with a big speech. It climbs ever upwards and erupts with a torrent of language. Standing Wave, however, is not your average play. Its climax comes wordlessly and beguilingly, with a piece of music.
Focusing on the life of the late Delia Derbyshire, creative light of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop and the imaginative presence behind the Dr. Who theme tune, the play delivers its emotional kick with a shimmering piece of electronica.
It’s a novel achievement and one that’s due to composer Pippa Murphy as much as playwright Nicola McCartney. They capture something of Derbyshire’s creative life and her era of sattelites, space probes and lunar landings when imaginative possibilities seemed limitless.
Derbyshire was a sonic explorer, propelled by a love of mathematics, Catholic chants and abstract noise to prove it was possible to make “beautiful electronic sound”. While Murphy provides the soundtrack for Derbyshire’s experiments, McCartney rewinds through the composer’s life, treating the script like reel-to-reel tape, reversing, splicing and echoing herself to powerful effect.
On Moley Campbell’s set - circular like a tape spool, panelled like a recording studio - Abigail Davies and Luisa Prosser play two incarnations of Derbyshire, their grins evoking a woman whose genius, sensitivity, paranoia and alcoholism would lead to a retreat from public life by the mid-1970s. But instead of a fact-based bio-drama, Standing Wave makes us listen. Directed by Katherine Morley for Reeling & Writhing, it gives us a real; sensory understanding of the passions behind a marginalised form of music.
By the end, you can almost believe the most influential event of November 1963 was not the release of I Want to Hold Your Hand, nor the killing of JFK, but the first airing of Derbyshire’s Dr. Who signature tune. It remains mesmerisingly strange.

Mark Fisher, 12 Oct 04

THE HERALD (4 Stars)

When BBC Radiophonic Workshop wunderkind Delia Derbyshire remodelled Ron Grainer’s theme music for Dr. Who in 1963, she made her own immortality. One character in this cut-up dramatised biography dismisses that composition as “a bit of fluff”, but look beyond it and you find a woman of her age, a pioneering libertine who, in the crucial decade of 1963 – 1974, went from blue-stocking control freak to pickled and neurotic boho flake.
Space and time are essential ingredients of Nicola McCartney’s script for Katherine Morley’s production, as, on New Year’s Day 1974, we find Derbyshire taking stock. Ten years earlier, another, altogether more focused Delia attempts to build the future. By having two actresses play Derbyshire in this way, moving backwards, we become witness to a life in reverse, until two become one and a “regeneration” of sorts occurs.
With a messy personal life invariably defined by men, Derbyshire never managed to loop the creative with the domestic, but, by emancipating sound, so she liberated a vital spark of herself. This co-production between Reeling & Writhing and The Tron, is mesmerisingly hypnotic. The multilayered textures of overlapping, occasionally over-dubbed voices are beautifully arranged and combine with Pippa Murphy’s score and wry set-pieces, like a pitch-perfect pastiche of a plummy-voiced Open University documentary.
Such a non-linear methodology honours its subject, with Abigail Davies and Luisa Prosser tantalisingly representing the parallel universes of Delia’s psyche, around which orbit assorted menfolk, played by Gary McInnes looking like a young R.D. Laing. Like Delia’s music, this show is electric.

Neil Cooper, Tuesday 12th October 2004

THE TIMES (4 Stars)

A standing wave arises when a reflected wave interferes constructively with its incident wave. Or to put it another way, it is the pattern of sound waves you get when a violin string is plucked. That’s the kind of thing you would have found yourself picking up in casual conversation with Delia Derbyshire, the brilliant, Cambridge-educated mathematician turned musician who was one of the geniuses of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop in the 1960s and early 70s.
A straightforward “bio-pic” Derbyshire would have been worth doing on its own account. She was the woman, after all, who created the unearthly sounds that Ron Grainer turned into the famous Dr. Who signature tune, currently being dusted off for a new generation, but Nicola McCartney has tried to do more than that in her new play. The marketing department may have winced as they saw a crowd-pleasing title involving the Doctor fading away in favour of something out of Higher Physics. But Derbyshire did the Dr. Who work at the beginning of her career and to her it ws nothing special. McCartney and her collaboprators at the Reeling and Writhing company and the Tron recognised that Derbyshire’s reaction to the world “going out of tune with itself”, as she put it, when relatively cheap synthesizers came in, and the way her creative mind worked, was more interesting than any one tune.
And in a bold step they have tried to capture the essence of Derbyshire by using the same techniques she used to make her music. So the play is fragmentary, impressionistic, distorts words and phrases, times and places and shines bright shafts of light for a moment into a dark corner before switching to something else. It is a bold and ambitious attempt, and two technically brilliant performances from the actresses who play Derbyshire, Abigail Davies and Luisa Prosser, are also crucial… a fascinating addition to a strong autumn season in Scottish theatre, a promising augury for the fast approaching National Theatre.

Robert Dawson Scott, 12 Oct 04

THE METRO (4 Stars)

Electronica pioneer Delia Derbyshire made her name for taking Ron Grainer’s original score for Dr Who and, by twiddling more than a few knobs, turning it into a classic. This was the early 1960s when, as part of the BBC’s Radiophonic Workshop, she ploughed a single-minded furrow to bring electronic music to the masses.
Her life story, however, as brought to the stage here in a Tron Theatre and Reeling & Writhing co-production, begins not in the 1960s, but on the cusp of 1974, with the older Derbyshire, played to great effect by Abigail Davies, alone at New Year, drunk, with only the radio for company.
From here on in… we’re taken on a journey back through the key moments that shaped her life and times – paranoia at feeling undermined and undervalued at the BBC; the troubled love affair with David Vorhaus – reeling back the years as we go.
The Davies Delia we first encounter is a 1970s throwback, all brightly coloured pantaloons and perplexed at the way her lot has panned out. Then the action switches and we’re shown an earlier Delia, played by Luisa Prosser. This is the workaholic, not alcoholic, Delia, wired for sound in all its forms, until the piece achieves synchronicity, with Davies and Prosser both occupying the same space and time… an intriguing, inventive piece that is not unlike watching a mix of Derbyshire’s life – one that enables us to see where she was coming from and, at the same time, where she was going.

Alan Chadwick, 12 Oct 04