Gagarin Way - A revival of a play about angry workers kidnapping their boss could hardly be more timely

Published on Thursday 30 July 2009 14:07

GREGORY BURKE'S GAGARIN WAY is an oddity – a play that feels more relevant now than it did when it was first performed back in 2001.

At the centre of its firecracker script are two Fife warehouse workers, Gary and Eddie, who kidnap a management consultant sent to assess their "viability" and force him to justify his actions at gunpoint. Gary wants answers, Eddie wants an excuse to indulge his penchant for violence and Tom, a young security guard who stumbles upon this deadly stand-off by accident, just wants everyone to get along.

When the play premiered at the Traverse eight years ago, in an award-winning production by John Tiffany, Gary and Eddie seemed almost quaint – a couple of throwbacks to a bygone age of militant industrial action, bosses and workers, us and them. It's not difficult to see why: when surveyed from the economic and political wreckage of 2009, the summer of 2001 seems like some sort of prelapsarian Eden. The Twin Towers were still standing – just – and hardly anyone outside MI6 had even heard of al-Qaeda. Tony Blair's New Labour government, still basking in its initial flush of popularity, had just won a second term, and the new-ish Chancellor, a fresh-faced Gordon Brown, was promising "an end to boom and bust". From a 2001 perspective, Gary and Eddie's pseudo-communist outlook seemed hopelessly out of date, and at times Burke's script seemed to be gleefully poking fun at the pair's tragi-comic adherence to such an outdated world view.

Fast-forward to the present day, though, and the play feels much more of-the-moment – so much so, in fact, that it could almost be a documentary. The global economic meltdown not only casts the characters of Gary and Eddie in a new light, it has turned them into flesh-and-blood reality.

Earlier this year, the media coined a new term – "bossnapping" – as the recession started to bite and disgruntled workers faced with the sack started holding their employers to ransom. In March, Luc Rousselet, the French director of the US multinational 3M, was held captive for several days by staff at the company's Poithievers plant as a protest over job cuts.

In the same month, in Paris, billionaire businessman Franois-Henri Pinault was trapped in a taxi by staff from his PPR retail group, angry about layoffs. Edinburgh-based employees of the Royal Bank of Scotland didn't manage to cage Sir Fred Goodwin in his office before he could scuttle off to spend his gargantuan pension, but disgruntled protestors did take out their frustration on his car and home.

Against this backdrop, the decision of the Comedians' Theatre Company to revive Gagarin Way at the Edinburgh Fringe this month – with an all-star, all-stand-up cast of Phil Nichol, Will Andrews, Jim Muir and Bruce Morton – looks like a stroke of genius. The way Nichol tells it, though, it's really more of a happy coincidence.

"It was first suggested that we do this play in 2006," he says. "It seemed pretty relevant then, but in the light of what's happened in the last year, it's extraordinary how relevant it is.

"Without being cheesy about it, it's prophetic. The action of this play is really likely – in fact I'm surprised you don't hear of this kind of thing happening more often. All you need is a few mentally unstable guys who are losing their jobs to decide they've got nothing left to lose."

Will people read the play differently now, post-recession? Will they be more likely to demonise the "boss" character, Frank (played by Bruce Morton) and see Gary (Muir) and Eddie (Nichol) as heroes for our times?

"I think what's happened will definitely change the way people react," says Nichol. "But in Bruce Morton we've got an actor who exudes that classic, Scottish 'life sucks' miserablism, so I think the audience will definitely feel sympathy for him."

In contrast to the original, conventionally staged Traverse production, this new version of Gagarin Way will be performed in the round, with the action played out within touching distance of the front row at the Stand Comedy Club. The show's director, Maggie Inchley, believes this intimate staging will also affect how people respond.

"The way we're staging it, you can't help feeling sorry for Frank," she says. "You're only a couple of yards away from a guy who's been kidnapped from his hotel room. He's got a bump on his head, he's tied up, he's got no shoes on and you see him physically helpless there in front of you.

"I think many of us at the moment are blaming bankers and lashing out at managers over what's happened, but actually being confronted with one, just a couple of feet away… it makes these people seem human again."

The Comedians' Theatre Company was established by Nichol in 2006 with the aim of "challenging the commonly held notion that comedians can't act" by casting stand-ups in straight dramas. The company's debut production, Talk Radio, starring Nichol and Stephen K Amos and directed by Stewart Lee, was a critical and commercial success; their two 2007 productions, Breaker Morant and Killer Joe, received some mixed reviews.

Inchley has directed CTC productions in the past, and finds working with comedians very different to working with actors.

"This is a bit of a gross generalisation, but actors take the whole thing very seriously – they're trained to do so and they're right to do so – but comedians don't tend to have that approach," she says. "They tend to take the piss a lot."

"Up until the point where they're in front of an audience, where they start taking things very seriously," says Nichol.

"We call it the audience ten per cent," he adds. "Usually, when actors rehearse they rehearse at the level they're going to be performing at, whereas comedians will walk it through and show each other what they're going to do and maybe once in a while do it, but for the most part, when they're rehearsing, they're just mapping it out.

"The minute you put a camera in the room, though, or get one other person in the room to watch it, they go up an extra ten per cent to what they're actually going to do. Every single show I've done with comedians has had the audience ten per cent. In rehearsals it's been like, 'Oooh, I dunno how this show's gonna go,' and then suddenly, first performance, everyone just goes, 'Right, I'm in front of an audience now,' and it's fine."

The perennial complaint that comedy is "taking over the Fringe" has had to be modified somewhat in recent years, as more and more comedians have started finding their way into the theatre section of the programme. Nichol was one of several top-flight stand-ups to appear in Guy Masterson's Fringe productions of 12 Angry Men (2003) and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (2004). Indeed, his website describes him as an "award-winning actor and comedian". Does he see his priorities in that order?

"I actually trained as an actor when I was a teenager," he says. "In fact I was actually a dancer first. I was in a contemporary dance company that did two small American tours. The show was called Mabel, Two nights at the Bowling Alley and I Can Do That, and we played in all these major cities, Detroit, Chicago, Buffalo, Toronto, in 1,000 seat theatres. So I guess technically I'm a dancer-actor-comic. But I do comedy for a living."

What a shame there are no opportunities for him to throw shapes in Gagarin Way. "That's what we could do," he deadpans. "We could do a dance interpretation of this play. It would actually suit – it's got struggle – anything with struggle in it is good for dance."

&#149 Gagarin Way is at the Stand Comedy Club, Edinburgh, 9-30 August, as part of the Edinburgh Fringe. To watch a film of Gagarin Way in rehearsal, log on to our festival blog, which you can find online at www.scotsman.com/artsblog from Saturday 8 August.