Theatre reviews: Peter Pan/Turbo Folk

Published on Wednesday 28 April 2010 19:04

PETER PAN *** KING'S THEATRE, GLASGOW TURBO FOLK **** ORAN MOR, GLASGOW

IF EVER there was a show to which any friend of Scottish theatre would wish a glowing, unambiguous success, it's John Tiffany's massive new National Theatre of Scotland production of Peter Pan, which opened at the King's Theatre in Glasgow this week, after years of preparation and a formidable investment of time and treasure. It's not only that the NTS now urgently needs a new large-scale, main-stage hit to match the triumph four years ago of the mighty Black Watch; it's that the show itself, in its inspiration and substance, is freighted with so many ideas that matter, and so much potential.

As writer David Greig and director John Tiffany have made clear in dozens of interviews over the past few weeks, the idea is to take JM Barrie's mighty story of Wendy and the Lost Boys and to repatriate it to late-Victorian Scotland, the land in which Barrie grew up and in which he lived through the formative and tragic experiences – notably the death by drowning of his adored older brother – that shaped the story of Pan, the boy who never grows up. And in creating a version of Peter Pan that has nothing to do with Christmas good cheer – and is not aimed at children under eight – Greig and Tiffany seek to confront the darker aspects of this haunting story, while also reflecting its magical elements.

And it's easy enough to see the traces of these ideas all over the stage, in the strange, uneasy version of the show that opened in Glasgow this week. They are present most obviously in Laura Hopkins's set, a massively cluttered, heavyweight affair featuring three diamond-shaped cantilevers of an as-yet uncompleted Forth Bridge; the children's father, Mr Darling, is reimagined here as an Edinburgh engineer working on its construction. They are present in Davey Anderson's music, a fascinating and powerful collage of Gaelic work-songs and laments, traditional lowland tunes and working navvies' songs of the 19th century. And they are present in the whole mood and tone of the show, which avoids prettiness and whimsy, engages powerfully with Pan's anger and emotional coldness and features disturbing echoes of dark and threatening ideas about the supernatural. This is a Peter Pan with doppelgngers and avatars, and even hints of demonic possession.

The difficulty, though, is that, despite the rich range of half-developed ideas that has gone into the making of the show, what emerges on stage is a royal mess, a dingy-looking voyage around the darker reaches of the Pan story that often lacks pace, always lacks clarity and misses out completely on the exhilarating, magical sense of freedom that Pan brings into the lives of Wendy and her brothers.

The set, for example, is a brilliant idea that doesn't work in practice, filling the stage with huge chunks of metal that constantly force the actors into the wrong dramatic positions, and often fail to reflect even the most basic elements of the story. The lighting is a pretentious disaster, often just plain inadequate to illuminate the actors' faces in a large theatre. The flying is awkwardly dependent on huge, heavy black harnesses, as ugly as they are unconvincing. The casting – well, there's a fine central performance from an impressive Kevin Guthrie as Pan, but the rest of the company are frankly forgettable and look far less like a coherent national theatre troupe than the company currently on stage at the Royal Lyceum.

And beyond all that, the show is plagued by a chronic lack of simple, basic storytelling drive, perhaps because it boasts a creative team of 14 people and therefore looks as if it has been designed by a committee. There's one electrifying scene in which Kirsty Mackay's attractive Wendy gathers her boys in a circle and tells them a story, provoking a confrontation with Pan; just for a moment, the positions are right, and the drama is clear. But soon we've drifted off again into a version of Tinkerbell's "death" that not only doesn't allow us to help save her, but doesn't even tell us whether she lives or dies. And in that, it resembles far too many other moments in a Peter Pan that desperately needs a longer view, a clearer focus and a ruthless visual simplification, if the brave ideas it carries are not to be lost forever in a sea of theatrical confusion.

After all that, it's a blazing relief to turn to a 40-minute, three-handed show that focuses fiercely on a single aspect of Scotland's myth-making about itself, tells its story with pace and economy and delivers a real and frightening dramatic punch. This week's Play, Pie and Pint lunchtime show, written by rising star Alan Bissett, is the short and brilliant tale of a doomed visit by a touring Scottish singer/songwriter to a whisky bar in some Balkan town still riven by memories of war.

In the great tradition of naive Scots abroad, the guileless Cameron – brilliantly played by Ryan Fletcher – thinks everyone abroad loves the Scots and hates the English; but to his minder Miko and heavyweight barman Vlad (Simon Donaldson and Steven McNicoll, both in magnificent form) he is just another Brit, blood brother of the "peacekeeping" soldiers who recently occupied, patronised and brutalised their country.

As the evening veers from the embarrassing to the dangerous, Vlad goads Cameron into giving up his girly love-songs, belting out Bonnie Dundee and unleashing his inner demons of violent machismo; "these songs are not innocent". And the games Bisset plays with language are dazzling, as Vlad and Miko converse in an impenetrable Balkan tongue that reveals itself as a reinvented form of Scots; and then the linguistic tables are turned, in a final shift of power that ends Cameron's innocence forever.

&149 Peter Pan is at the King's Theatre, Glasgow, until 8 May; then at the Edinburgh Festival Theatre from 8-12 June and on tour to London, Inverness and Aberdeen. Turbo Folk is at Oran Mor, Glasgow, until Saturday.