Theatre reviews: Long Gone Lonesome/The Dark Things/That Face

Published on Wednesday 14 October 2009 18:57

LONG GONE LONESOME **** CARNEGIE HALL, CLASHMORE THE DARK THINGS **** TRAVERSE THEATRE, EDINBURGH THAT FACE *** TRON, GLASGOW

IT'S A Sunday afternoon, sometime between 1955 and 1970. In a modest house on Burra Island, off the west coast of Shetland, a man with a guitar is standing alone at the kitchen table; he sings, he strums and he painstakingly records and re-records a series of country and western songs on to an old reel-to-reel tape recorder, until he feels he has got the sound and the arrangement exactly as he wants it.

This is the image at the centre of the National Theatre of Scotland's Long Gone Lonesome, currently on tour around northern Scotland. The man in this true-life story is Thomas Fraser, a Burra fisherman who died in 1978 at the age of only 50, but whose powerful, sharp-edged country voice and magical guitar playing became well known throughout Shetland and beyond during his lifetime.

The show is billed as "a musical celebration" of Fraser's life, to be followed by a bit of a ceilidh; essentially, it's the Orkney writer Duncan McLean's short biographical tribute to the man, as performed by McLean himself with his own five-piece Lone Star Swing Band, who punctuate the story with more than a dozen of Fraser's favourite songs. Audiences should be warned that all of this has a thoroughly hand-knitted feel. It's hesitant, slightly repetitive, not too analytical.

Musically, it falls short of the sharpness of Fraser's own work; and it's arguable that given the resources available to it, the NTS should have half a dozen music shows like this on the road this autumn, rather than this single, fragile piece. In presenting this show exactly as it is, though, the NTS's boss, Vicky Featherstone, who directs, is clearly making a statement about what matters most in cultural life at the moment: it's about integrity rather than smartly polished finish; about the impulse to shake off old dividing lines between art forms, and – above all – about the need to honour and protect the kind of unsung grassroots creativity that Thomas Fraser represented.

If Thomas Fraser preferred to work alone in his kitchen, avoiding fame and acclaim, then his music represents a powerful polar opposite to the kind of art that grabs so many headlines today; conceptual work that is not about craft or skill, but about the cannibalisation of life itself for colossal financial gain. The power of Ursula Rani Sarma's fine new play, The Dark Things, at the Traverse, lies in its grasp of the truth that, in the age of YouTube and Facebook, the plight of the artist at the centre of the story is only a magnified version of a much more general tragedy, in a society increasingly addicted to sadistic forms of reality-based entertainment.

The anti-hero of the story is Daniel, a self-absorbed but well-meaning young artist, superbly played by Brian Ferguson, who – together with LJ, a beautiful pole-dancer – is one of the two survivors of a horrific bus crash. LJ has lost her legs in the crash, while Daniel is physically intact. But after his exhibition paying tribute to the victims becomes a roaring financial and critical success, Daniel slides into a downward spiral of self-hatred, unable to accept LJ's love, and finally connected only to his crazy kid sister Steph, a talentless showbiz wannabe, and to his even more crazy psychiatrist, Gerry.

In many ways, Rani Sarma's play is a sharp black comedy for our times. But in the end, it emerges as something more like a post-modern tragedy with a comic sub-plot, with Suzanne Donaldson, as LJ, producing a toweringly brave and brilliant performance as a strong woman finally driven to utter despair. And in the powerful movement of its drama – superbly directed by Dominic Hill, on a fine exhibition-space set by Neil Warmington – the play raises troubling questions about how our voyeuristic culture creates new and terrible zones of conflict and inequality between men and women, as it feeds the erotic fantasies of one sex, and reduces the other to mere camera-fodder.

After these two complex and challenging pieces of 21st-century theatre, it comes as a disappointment to find the main stage at the Tron occupied by a conventional piece of bourgeois family drama, as self-absorbed and miserable as they come. Polly Stenham's debut play, That Face, caused a sensation when it opened in London two years ago, mainly because of the sensational extremity of the family situation it portrays.

The play opens as Mia, a boarder at a posh girls' school, is sent home in disgrace after taking part in a sadistic initiation ritual; the irony is that she has no home to go to, since her father is living in Hong Kong with his youthful Asian bride, and her mother, Martha, is a raging, intemperate lush, who hates her daughter and is conducting an incestuously close relationship with Henry, her 18-year-old son and full-time carer. As soon as Martha's character is unveiled, though – needy, wild, beguiling and totally destructive – the indictment on today's generation of fortysomething parents becomes absolutely clear; they're all selfish and self-indulgent emotional infants, who have no idea how to love or care for their vulnerable offspring.

The only problem with this thesis is that it isn't generally true; and where it contains a grain of dramatic truth, that grain is soon overwhelmed by the sheer bizarreness of the situation.

There are storming performances in Andy Arnold's production, from Kathryn Howden as Martha, Hollie Gordon as Mia and James Young as Henry. But if Long Gone Lonesome is a example of a show that does the right thing, although sometimes not well enough, That Face is the kind of show that does the wrong thing, but does it well enough to make one wish this gifted Tron company better luck with their material, next time round.

&#149 Long Gone Lonesome is at the Tolbooth, Stirling, tonight, the Birnam Institute tomorrow, and on tour in northern Scotland until 24 October. The Dark Things continues at the Traverse until 24 October, and That Face is at the Tron until 24 October.