Theatre review: An Argument About Sex | Long Player | Adolf Hitler: My Part In His Downfall

Published on Wednesday 7 October 2009 18:58

AN ARGUMENT ABOUT SEX **** TRAMWAY, GLASGOW LONG PLAYER ** ORAN MOR, GLASGOW ADOLF HITLER: MY PART IN HIS DOWNFALL **** ROYAL LYCEUM, EDINBURGH

IN A SMALL theatre space set up to look like the office area of a warehouse off the M25, a city high-flier called Charlie and his ex-girlfriend Helen – who is also his company's legal compliance officer – talk, argue and warily circle one another. She has just discovered that she is pregnant with his child, following a brief reunion at an awayday conference. But she knows him of old – his aggression, his faithlessness and his lack of emotional commitment; and she is also running a theory that if the city of London had been run by women, then last year's great financial crash might never have happened.

This is the opening scene of An Argument About Sex, a new version of Marivaux's 1744 war-of-the-sexes comedy La Dispute written by Pamela Carter and staged by brilliant director-designer Stewart Laing; and for a searing 20 minutes – up to the moment when Charlie opens the warehouse doors to reveal the shocking and fascinating "reality" experiment in gender politics he has been conducting – Stuart Bowman and Selina Boyack make it seem as if we might be in the presence of the most exciting Scottish theatre premiere since Black Watch.

The show becomes even more thrilling as the audience follows the actors out of the office area, through a hospital-like tunnel lined with screens showing film of experiments with young babies, into the huge open spaces of an Astroturfed Eden scattered with little chairs where – in the true spirit of Marivaux's play – we watch the first sexual encounters of a group of young people raised in ignorance of society's cultural assumptions about gender and sex.

At this point, though, the play begins to lose it grip, playing along with a series of stereotypes from Marivaux's original text that lack resonance in the 21st century. If every girl once naturally felt that she was the most beautiful creature on earth, that certainly isn't the case in our painfully body-conscious times; and the posh-nave acting style adopted by the four actors playing the young people is both irritating and a touch dull.

The show improves again, though, in the final 15 minutes, when we swivel round to watch a film of Carter and Laing in conversation with leading evolutionary biologist Matt Ridley, who treads rev-ealingly through some of the key questions we are now asking – like our 18th century forebears – about genetics, free will, and the very essence of human nature. In setting and atmosphere, An Argument About Sex is a breathtaking show; in terms of its subject-matter, it could hardly be more relevant to our painful post-feminist times. And if the execution sometimes fails to measure up to the concept, it's still a fascinating experience. See it for yourself, at the Tramway this week or the Traverse later this month, and go home arguing the toss about the vital questions it raises.

The battle of the sexes also looms large in this week's Oran Mor show, Heather MacLeod's Long Player, although in this case, alas, it takes a much more conventional form. Angie is a 53-year-old woman in the West End of Glasgow whose husband – in a typical midlife crisis – has left her for a much younger colleague. Now, four years on, he is coming round to collect some of his old long-playing records; and as Angie sorts through them, she finds that some of her wounds are more easily reopened than she hoped. Through a stilted 40 minutes or so – punctuated by embarrassing clumsy blackout scene-changes – Tamara Kennedy works her way through Angie's monologue about her situation, pausing for occasional live encounters with David Anderson as the ex-husband, and Samantha Shields as her daughter, Lorna. But although these dialogue scenes have a touch of energy about them, the monologue sequences are so dramatically pointless, and delivered at such low volume, that it often seems as if the audience might as well leave the room. In monologue writing, there is only one dramatic relationship, between speaker and audience; and where that relationship has no apparent reason for existing, drama tends to fail.

Relationships between men and women certainly get a mention in Chichester Festival Theatre's heartfelt and engaging touring version of the Spike Milligan classic Adolf Hitler – My Part In His Downfall; but only in the wistful tones common among groups of fighting men who haven't really seen a woman for months. Staged by Tim Carroll in an artfully hand-knitted music-theatre style – with all five actors playing several musical instruments and singing beautifully, as well as acting their sweaty socks off – this attractive stage version by Tim Carroll and Ben Power, briefly at the Royal Lyceum this week, uses the format of an army concert-party to tell the story of Spike's war.

And what's striking about that story, finally, is how closely it mirrors the view of war contained in much more serious treatments of the subject, from Black Watch and Journey's End to All Quiet On The Western Front. Milligan's trademark surreal humour is there, of course, unique and astonishing, although not at all out of place in the desperate jokiness of the front line; and so is some wonderful music of the period, notably Spike's beloved jazz. But there's also sadness, and horror, and the terrible legacy both of lives lost, and of mental damage; and it's a measure of the quality of this ensemble company – led by an inspired and touching Sholto Morgan as Spike – that they convey all of those emotional depths without ever missing a comic beat.

• An Argument About Sex is at the Tramway, Glasgow, until 17 October, and at the Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh, 29 October until 7 November. Long Player and Adolf Hitler: My Part In His Downfall both run until Saturday.