As playwright David Harrower confides in a program note, Ciarais a play about "Glasgow and its mythic, proud, scarred history. I've written a woman at the center of it; silent witness to a changing cityscape finally telling it as she sees it.”
The woman in Harrower's pungently crafted monologue, now being presented as part of the 2013 Edinburgh Fringe Festival, is played by Blythe Duff, an actress of uncommon skill (as fans of TV's “Taggert” will know). Clad in an elegant evening dress but standing in the middle of a dim, squalid set resembling the basement of an abandoned factory, Duff, working without props and eschewing conventional stage business and behavior, holds the audience in thrall by means of her commanding presence and virtuosic way with words. Her deep strong voice wends its way in and out of Harrower's text sinuously, feeling out its notes and colors like a concert pianist.
The juxtaposition of elegance and squalor is not accidental; Ciara’s theme is the clashing sides of modern day Glasgow, a city whose surface affluence and glitter are rooted in crime and corruption.
Ciara, the eponymous heroine of Harrower's monologue, is the daughter of a big-time gangster. Mick tried to shield her from the truth of his sordid life, but the truth eventually did out and shattered all her illusions. She still continues to run an art gallery specializing in the work of contemporary Scottish painters, one of whom, Torrance, is her favorite. Torrance, once popular but now “a man in retreat,” has painted a portrait of a “sleeping giantess held calmly in Glasgow's embrace.” But even as she champions Torrance's work, Ciara knows she has become a different person, a harder person. Her father's drug dealing, her husband's philandering and her beloved brother's death from an overdose have changed her irrevocably. She now plays a cynical, opportunistic game with everyone around her, making sure to always get what she wants. In short, she has become one of those figures in a Torrance portrait, a symbol of “mother Glasgow and her sacred women.”
