The Cause of Thunder Play with David Hayman, discussion and book signing Oran Mor, Sunday 12 MARCH

David Hayman’s tour of The Cause of Thunder.
Discussion, book signing, and drinking in the bar after!
Oran Mor 19.30PM Sunday 12 MARCH, 2017
Bob Cunningham, the ageing firebrand at the centre of Chris Dolan’s solo play, performed with partisan gusto by David Hayman Dolan’s sequel to his pre-referendum companion piece, The Pitiless Storm, is a kind of living newspaper that heaps iniquity after iniquity onto Bob and the strata of working class west of Scotland society he represents.
Dolan’s script is two-tiered in David Hayman Junior’s production for the Fair Pley company. On the one hand, Bob is a Lear-like figure, briefly in exile from his own ideals while he takes stock of his own mortality as a principled survivor of the post-truth age. On the other, Bob’s affirmations as he rediscovers his faith in his own beliefs as much as the wider human spirit are dispatches from the front-line of the bar-room revolution. Hayman flits briskly between gallus bravura, lingering pathos and a fierce commitment to something better as Bob attempts to make sense of the mess which the majority of us have had thrust upon us by the darkest of powers imaginable.
The Herald
The Cause of Thunder is a blistering one-man Brexistential crisis full of humour and pathos… Bob (David Hayman) has collected stories of visionary transcendence …these vivid sketches of transcendence act as a counterpoint to Bob’s tirades against the system. … The script is full of great surprises. After his powerful performance, Hayman does a Q &A. Nearly everyone seems to have a question and a bit of banter with the actor.
Plays To See
Hayman has always been determined to link his work on stage and screen to the struggle to speak truth to power; and it’s hardly surprising that the audience at the Tron greets him like a comrade, and a star in whom they can take pride.
In this play, we see Bob at the point of possible retirement, in his local pub, mulling over a letter saying that he’s now eligible to hang up his marching boots. And Dolan’s text is at its strongest when it relaxes into a wry, funny and perceptive exploration of what that moment can mean. Hayman is brilliant at conjuring up the voices of Glasgow as they kindly patronise the old codger doddering to the shops, and equally brilliant at evoking Bob’s own inner monologue about the perils and possibilities of old age. The show also contains a streak of pure lyrical beauty, as Bob remembers the stories his late, estranged wife Ethel would tell him, a kind of Glasgow magic realism, half true, half fantastical.
The Scotsman
OanMor, Top of Byres Road, G12
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