Theatre reviews: Outlying Islands | Betrayal | Mums and Lovers

OUTLYING ISLANDS
****
PITLOCHRY FESTIVAL THEATRE

BETRAYAL
***
BYRE THEATRE, ST ANDREWS

MUMS AND LOVERS
**
ORAN MOR, GLASGOW

OF ALL the great themes of drama, there's none more powerful than the subject of human sexual feeling and what happens when that feeling comes into explosive conflict with social conventions and moral rules. Two people meet, desire flickers, and in a flash, the plot is in motion; unless, of course, there are no existing partners or moral inhibitions, in which case there's no drama at all.

In David Greig's Outlying Islands – first seen at the Traverse Theatre in 2002, and now revived at Pitlochry in a thoughtful and impressive production by Ken Alexander – two young Cambridge chaps of the class of 1939, Robert and John, arrive on a remote island off the west coast of Scotland, to make a survey of the bird populations for the Ministry of Defence. Robert is a breezy scientific hyper-rationalist, who scorns conventional morality; John is a conventional decent chap of the period, loath even to talk about his sexual feelings, never mind to act on them. With them come Kirk, a crusty old crofter, and Kirk's pretty niece Ellen, a 20-year-old Laurel and Hardy fan eager for freedom and adventure. When the old man dies in questionable circumstances, the sexual tensions among the three young people soon reach a fatal crisis point.

To describe the outline of the story, though, is only to offer a glimpse of the richness of Greig's play, which looks even more timely and impressive than it did in 2002. In the tension between Robert and John, it seems to sum up the entire political, scientific and ethical debate of the last three generations about human nature, and about the intrinsic value – or lack of it – of human beings, on our ever more overcrowded planet. Robert's ruthless and amoral nature-worship seems frightening and inhuman; John's hyper-conventional morality feeble and irritating.

But in the end – in a foreshadowing of the outcome of the Second World War, and perhaps of our own current environmental crisis – Greig hints that it's the man who knows how to compromise with society and others who is, paradoxically, more likely to survive, and to reproduce himself, than the nature-worshipping "superman".

Ken Alexander's production reaches no great heights of analysis or depths of symbolism in its approach to the play, and sometimes seems a little short of poetry and mystery. Instead, it gives the drama to us straight, on a handsome island set, beautifully lit by Ace McCarron, that pays some homage to the play's sub-theme of voyeurism, and the strange human capacity to be both participant and detached observer. Grant O'Rourke is outstanding as the troubled, immensely charismatic Robert, Claire Dargo superb as Ellen, the quiet island girl with huge hidden reserves of strength, common sense, and radical boldness. And as for the sex, naked, beautiful and serious – well, these days, Pitlochry audiences seem well able to take scenes like these on the chin; provided they come as part of a drama as rich, compelling, and slow-moving but beautifully-structured, as David Greig's Outlying Islands.

All of which conspires, oddly enough, to make Harold Pinter's Betrayal – coming to the end of its summer run at the Byre in a confident-looking and enjoyable production by Michael Emans's Rapture Theatre – look like a rather shallow play about the private marital traumas of London publishing folk. First seen in London in 1978, Betrayal famously moves backwards through time, over a period of ten years, to tell the story of a clandestine affair between Emma, the wife of London publisher Robert, and her husband's colleague and best friend, Jerry.

Long recognised as one of Pinter's most accessible works, the play is interesting primarily for the way in which its reversed structure exposes the tissue of lies, silences and unspoken pain which inevitably grows up around such an affair; and also for the exceptional beauty of its final scene, an enduring tribute to the power and sweetness of the desire that brought Emma and Jerry together in the first place.

Some 30 years on, though, Betrayal is also beginning to look like a throwback to an era of English emotional understatement and reticence that seems to be long gone. These days, Emma would probably be writing a newspaper column about the joys of adultery, Robert would be publishing it in book form; and all three would probably be telling the story of their triangular relationship on daytime television.

In the opening play of this autumn's Oran Mor season Rab C Nesbit screenwriter Ian Pattison offers us Mums And Lovers, a Glasgow version of Sex And The City in which three female friends – all married women in their thirties – meet in a wine bar for their regular Thursday night date, and decide whether to indulge in some adulterous dalliance with a couple of handsome blokes at the next table. There's plenty of raw sitcom potential in this drama, which sets up three clearly-drawn characters – the prim one, the brash one, the hysterical one – and wades firmly into the fraught territory of marital sexual boredom, helped by strong performances from Gabriel Quigley, Julie Austin and Shonagh Price.

At Oran Mor, though, the whole show is ruined by the grim texture of Pattison's writing, which keeps descending into the most embarrassingly prurient, potty-mouthed and misconceived male attempt to imagine what women sound like when they're discussing their sex lives in the absence of men.

Write about what you know, says one of the oldest and most familiar pieces of advice to writers, and although it's one of those rules that's made to be broken, in this case, Pattison might have been well advised to stick to it.

• Outlying Islands in repertoire at Pitlochry Festival Theatre until 16 October. Betrayal at the Byre Theatre, St Andrews, and Mums And Lovers at Oran Mor, Glasgow, both until tomorrow.