Theatre reviews: The Last Supper | Selkie | Handle With Care
The Last Supper is just one tasty bite from this year’s Take Me Somewhere festival, writes Joyce McMillan
The Last Supper, Tramway, Glasgow ★★★★★
Selkie – The Wet And Wild Show! Tramway, Glasgow ★★★★
Handle With Care, The Boardwalk, Glasgow ★★★★
On the main stage at the Tramway, something wild is happening. Beneath an image of Da Vinci’s great wall painting of the Last Supper, a group of fearless Brazilian theatre-makers from Sao Paulo are gathered; a company called Mexa, founded 13 years ago following a wave of gender violence across homeless hostels in the city, that includes members who themselves have known homelessness and violence, and that may – just may – be celebrating its own last supper before breaking up.
So on stage, they sit in a row at a long refectory table, gazing out at the audience, part reflection of Da Vinci’s painting, part smashed-up modern wedding party. Most of the 13 are women, some of them trans women; a couple are men.
They are all, though, gloriously, inimitably themselves; and their show partly evolves as a slightly infuriating act of continuous self-reflection. There are substantial chunks of film from their Sao Paulo refectory rehearsal room going back to 2012, reflections on the fights with the group, and one live punch-up on stage, with glittery dresses and bridal veils flying. There is also music, which is absolutely never what the subtitles say it is – Mariah Carey’s Without You, for example, is many things, but not “Brazilian regional music”.
Through it all, though – and through six or seven different endings, perhaps allowable in a show about endings – The Last Supper, co-commissioned by Take Me Somewhere and Tramway with theatres in Leeds and London – never loses its grasp on the sheer thrill of theatre that is fully alive; evolving in front of the audience like a car-crash family party, teetering around on impossible heels, inviting 25 audience members to join them for a fully cooked chicken dinner, singing badly or stunningly well, both sacred and utterly profane.
And in that sense, The Last Supper is a near-perfect centrepiece for the Take Me Somewhere Festival, the wild child of Glasgow’s great live art tradition, whose survival seems like something of a miracle in theses days of tightly controlled theatre programmes and budgets.
My TMS weekend – only a small glimpse of the shows available – also involved a visit to Selkie: The Wet And Wild Show!, a gorgeous, blue-tinged and desperately athletic hour-long cabaret by Glasgow-based theatre maker Craig Manson, based on Scottish myths about selkie seal-people, in which he and three wet-suit clad female assistants explore both the utter cruelty of humankind’s relationship with the animals we tame and display, and the joyful polymorphous sexuality of a creature that seems born to party.
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I caught a brief glimpse of Paul Ramirez Jonas’s Public Trust exhibition at GOMA, about the power of the promises and vows we make or that are made to us, in public, political and private life. And I spent a sweetly harmonious hour experiencing Handle With Care, a show like a cross between a Pandora’s Box myth and an unboxing video, curated by the great Ontroerend Goed company of Gent, in which audiences all over the world create a show entirely on their own, based on instructions in a cardboard box that sits on stage until one audience member is brave enough to go and open it up.
And the festival rolls on until next Saturday, in venues across Glasgow, featuring performance and exhibitions from Scotland and Argentina, Switzerland, Australia, Belgium and Canada. None of it is conventional, some of it is self-absorbed, most of it is gloriously mind-expanding. And if it often seems like a festival designed to provide a rich infusion of new ideas for Glasgow’s huge community of creative workers and artists, it’s often all the more joyful for that; as packed audiences throng the Tramway and other venues to see shows that mostly fear nothing, challenge everything and look fabulous while they do it.
The Take Me Somewhere Festival 2025 continues until 26 October. For details see https://takemesomewhere.co.uk/2025-festival-overview.