Alan Bissett: The Red Hourglass

If you, like me, are involuntarily appointed spider catcher in a home where you can be called into service at any moment by a distinctive petrified scream from your other half, then you too will probably be given to grumpily re-treading arachnid truisms like: “it’s tiny” and “it’s more scared of you.”

Scottish writer of the year Alan Bissett—his household’s spider siren—here amusingly anthropomorphises six six-legged creepy crawlies as a study of the irrationality of certain human fears, without concealing the discomforting and in some cases even dangerous habits to which arachnids are naturally predisposed.

Held captive in a St Andrews laboratory, there’s a bantering Glaswegian house spider, a jumpy New Yoiker recluse spider, a macho revolutionary Venezuelan tarantula, a black widow—the lethal female arachnid, imagined as a nasty temptress in kinky black boots—and a hawk wasp, played as a passive-aggressive blabbermouth counsellor.

As in the critically lauded Moira Monologues, Bissett’s a joy to watch as a solo actor, skilfully giving life to each character through versatility of voice and mannerisms. His language is crisply economic, and punctuated by whip-smart, distinctly Scottish humour – be it when he pokes fun at himself by making the hawk wasp question the tarantula’s dodgy accent, or when the house spider takes political umbrage at being called “common.”

We’re forced to confront socially constructed fear in the human world, and the frightening immutability of nature, which for all our efforts to control it through science always finds a way of creeping back up on us. As, at the end, our stomachs nervously tighten at footage of a scurrying black widow in close-up, it’s us that feel small.