The ticket

Published on Sunday 20 May 2007 00:39

THE FLOUERS O EDINBURGH/SNAKE IN THE GRASS ***

Pitlochry Festival Theatre Saturday, May 12

I write in praise of Carol Ann Crawford. For too long this fine actress has been seen in smaller character roles or behind the scenes working as a dialect coach. But those who remember her from major parts at the Traverse and the Royal Lyceum in the 1980s and 90s or who saw her performance in Further Than The Furthest Thing last year will know she's worth very much more than that. Should you be in any doubt, just check out the opening productions in Pitlochry's summer season and watch her command the stage in two completely contrasting parts.

In Robert McLellan's The Flouers O Edinburgh, Crawford plays Girzie Carmichael, a well-to-do 18th century lady consigned to an Edinburgh tenement after her country estate has been confiscated for the family's support of Bonnie Prince Charlie. As aunt of Suzanne Donaldson's plucky love interest Kate, sister of Robin Harvey Edward's disciplinarian general and mistress of Martyn James's eccentric servant Jock, she brings a winning combination of authority, benevolence and humanity. Just as importantly, she handles McLellan's Scots with a sense of meaning and melody that gives it full poetic flight.

This is crucial in a comedy all about the legitimacy of the Scots language, being set 50 years after the Act of Union among an Edinburgh elite in thrall to the English tongue. No one better illustrates this than Grant O'Rourke's Charles Gilchrist, a humourless prig whose London education has left him with a hilariously warped accent and a sad lack of appreciation of his own culture. Against Crawford's confident Scots his distorted vowels are more funny still.

It's in the first and last acts that Richard Baron's opulent production is at its best. A convoluted plot deprives the middle act of energy and humour, and things aren't helped by a couple of actors with a much weaker mastery of the language. Generally, though, it's a jolly romp that's lost little of its satirical sting.

After The Flouers O Edinburgh, Crawford reinvents herself as a modern-day upper-middle-class Englishwoman returned home to inherit her father's property in Alan Ayckbourn's spooky Snake In The Grass. In contrast to her earlier exuberance, in John Durnin's ultra-realistic production she is buttoned-up and tense, offended by the very intrusion of her father's former nurse (Lorna McDevitt), never mind by the younger woman's blackmail attempt.

Teasing the audience with the sudden shocks of a ghost story, Ayckbourn also works in troubling stories of wife battering and child abuse. But the enjoyable silliness of the ghost story cheapens the genuinely dark material, giving the unfortunate impression that Ayckbourn finds the whole thing a bit of a laugh. As with many a ghost story, you're engaged in the telling but deflated by the end.

Pitlochry Theatre (01796 484 626), season runs until October 20 www.pitlochry.org.uk