TRUMPETS AND RASPBERRIESROYAL LYCEUM THEATRE, EDINBURGH
**
THE WASP FACTORYTRON, GLASGOW
***
YARN VERDANT WORKS, EDINBURGH
****
IF EVER there was a risk of Scottish theatre be
coming complacent about its recent achievements, this was the kind of week that acts as a wake-up call. Two of our leading companies roll out shows that fail to match their own highest standards, although Grid Iron at Dundee run themselves close; and a gifted young director makes a brave dash at a 1980s classic, but doesn't quite do it justice. And in all three cases, the underlying problem is the same; a shortage of penetrating high-powered thought about why this material matters, and about how it can best be reshaped for our time.
The Royal Lyceum's new production of Dario Fo's Trumpets and Raspberries, for example, should have been a gift of an opportunity to revamp this fine old socialist farce of the early 1980s for the age of the war on terror. Set originally in a north Italian car-town, in a period scarred by Red Brigade abductions of leading Italian politicians and industrialists, the play famously imagines an incident in which the real-life Fiat boss Gianni Agnelli is hideously disfigured in a failed kidnap attempt, and ends up – thanks to a misunderstanding at the clinic – with the face of a humble employee, Antonio Berardi.
Its theme is the colossal gap in wealth and privilege between Berardi and Agnelli, whom Antonio's puzzled wife Rosa now has to treat as her husband; and the extent to which the Italian state is in hock to big-time capitalism, which it bails out at every turn. Turn Agnelli into Fred Goodman of the Royal Bank of Scotland, in other words – and Fo's lumbering satires on state surveillance into something suitable for the age of GPS snooping – and you have an update to die for, set to hit all the red-hot political buttons of our age.
Instead, though, the Lyceum company and director Tony Cownie produce what must be one of the most half-hearted updates of a classic ever seen on a major British stage. It starts well enough, setting the action in Edinburgh a few years hence, when David Cameron is in Downing Street, and Menzies Campbell has just been kidnapped and murdered by terrorists.
It soon becomes clear, though, that this is really a show caught in some vague dramatic no-man's-land between Turin in 1981 and Edinburgh in 2011; the names and some patched-in political references are new, but everything else remains stuck in the past. Jimmy Chisholm and Kathryn Howden turn in heroic comic performances as Agnelli/Berardi and Rosa, as brilliant and creative as possible under the circumstances. But in the end, the show becomes a painfully unfunny masterclass in how even the best actors can't save a farce that fails to find the right rhythm, or basic comic set-up. And the lesson is that if you want to update Dario Fo for the 21st century, you need a writer on the project, and a good one.
It's not so much a writer that's lacking in Cumbernauld Theatre's new touring version of Iain Banks's seminal 1980s novel The Wasp Factory, as a director who fully responds to the writing in front of him. The Wasp Factory is a brilliant, chilling piece of island Scottish horror that suddenly flowers, at the end, into aching compassion for its damaged central character. Its big theme lies in the suggestion that death-cults are born, in any culture, through the brutal suppression of womanliness; and when this spare stage adaptation by Malcolm Sutherland first appeared in the early 1990s, it came as a powerful precursor to the violent, in-your-face theatre of that decade.
The problem with Ed Robson's vivid new production, though, is that its often slightly gorgeous visual imagery – a wooden wall of little doors and windows, fairy lights, water – simply doesn't reflect either the unmagical bleakness of the story, or its central theme; and the decision to cast Nicola Jo Cully as the hero, Frank, robs the final revelation of Frank's gender of its sickening shock-value. There are some terrific images here; and Robbie Jack gives a strikingly theatrical performance as Frank's mad brother Eric. But there's a necessary quality of ironic dourness in Banks's story that Robson misses; and Cully's Frank is all wounded feistiness, with no deep cultural roots at all.
Grid Iron's Yarn, co-produced with Dundee Rep at the city's textile-industry museum in the old Verdant Works, is, by contrast, a wholly charming series of reflections on the role of clothes and fabrics in human history, sexuality and identity. I can't, off-hand, recall any Grid Iron show that ever seemed less driven by a serious sense of dramatic purpose, or that had less of a dramaturgical through-line. The mood is playful, with a hint of mediaeval pastiche and gothic horror; the literary inspirations are piecemeal.
What's attractive about Yarn, though, is its imaginative attempt – short of actually hiring a writer – to engage with Dundee as a textile town, and to use the words and voices of Dundee Ensemble to evoke a deeper understanding of its past. It also features a bracing sense of internationalism, an acknowledgment that the textile industry, one way or the other, has always been based on exploitative links with the other side of the world. And it has a gloriously eclectic finale, co-staged in an old roofless mill-shed by Janet Smith of Scottish Dance Theatre, that races like a thing possessed through an eccentric world history of cloth and its abuses; leaving audiences with a 90-minute experience that's not deep, but glamorous, allusive and sometimes even thought-provoking.
• Trumpets and Raspberries is at the Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh, until 10 May. The Wasp Factory is at the Tron, Glasgow, until tomorrow, and then touring across Scotland. Yarn is at Verdant Works, Dundee, until 3 May.
The full article contains 1012 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
