Theatre reviews: The Miracle Man/Whistle Down The Wind/Battery Farm

Published on Wednesday 17 March 2010 18:02

THE MIRACLE MAN **** TRON THEATRE, GLASGOW WHISTLE DOWN THE WIND *** PLAYHOUSE, EDINBURGH BATTERY FARM *** ORAN MOR, GLASGOW

THERE'S something cooking in the two most recent plays by Ayrshire-born playwright Douglas Maxwell: something different from the teenage rite-of-passage plays that made his name, and much tougher and more adult in its concerns. In his fine monologue Promises, Promises – seen at the Tron and the Traverse last month – he confronted the dilemmas of an ageing Scottish schoolteacher in London who has spent a lifetime in flight from an oppressive religious upbringing, only to find a vulnerable Somalian child in her class being subjected to new forms of religious unreason.

And now, in a new play commissioned by the National Theatre of Scotland and directed by Vicky Featherstone as part of their current young people's season, he imagines the plight of a young PE teacher called Ozzy (short for Ossian, since he's the son of a famous Scottish poet) who finds his school being swept by a wave of 21st-century religious hysteria, when teams of screaming teenagers – both Christian and Muslim – start to demand a visit from the Miracle Man, a rock star-style American preacher who offers them little sparkly rings, in exchange for pledges of virginity and purity.

What Maxwell seems to be expressing here – in both plays – is the mild panic of a generation of secularists, just old enough to remember the damage that was sometimes done by traditional forms of faith, who suddenly find themselves grown up in a world where faith has once again become a major political force. It has to be said that Maxwell handles this incendiary material much better in Promises, Promises than he does in this six-handed play, which runs for a full two and a half hours. It's as if the monologue form forces him to discipline and organise his ideas, whereas the loose dramatic form of The Miracle Man – which shifts constantly between school, home, head's office, and the hospital where Ozzy's father lies dying – allows him to include everything but the kitchen sink, and to overwrite compulsively, notably in Ozzy's long, tortured hospital bedside monologues.

Yet for all these weaknesses, there's a huge, ambitious and seriously Scottish energy about The Miracle Man that is downright seductive. The play's politics are confused, its plot resolution is sentimental and its themes are too many for any one drama. Yet it's a tribute to the script's huge vitality that it supports a thrilling range of in-your-face performances, not only from a superbly bonkers Jimmy Chisholm as the eccentric headteacher Healy, but from Keith Fleming as Ozzy, Sally Reid as the nurse who becomes his love, and an unforgettable Charlene Boyd and Shabana Bakhsh, as two kids on the cusp of adulthood, in a world increasingly without waymarks, or even elementary common sense.

Faith is also the theme of Mary Hayley Bell's fine 1959 novel Whistle Down The Wind, in which a family of motherless children in a bleak Yorkshire dale come to believe that an escaped prisoner hiding in their barn is the returned Christ of whom they have heard so much from local preachers. Andrew Lloyd Webber's 1996 musical – at the Playhouse this week in Bill Kenwright's own good-looking and heartfelt touring production – famously relocates the story to the American bible belt in the years before civil rights, a setting which perfectly matches the story's sense of rural community driven by a punitive form of faith, and fond of using biblical imagery to justify and externalise its own tensions and aggressions.

The problem with the current version of Kenwright's production lies fairly and squarely with the casting – in the extremely complex and demanding lead role of The Man – of X-Factor graduate Jonathan Ansell, who struggles to achieve the combination of contained acting power, vocal control and sheer presence which the role demands. Whistle Down The Wind, though, remains one of Lloyd Webber's most impressive shows, striving to express the deep truth that if faith can be dangerous, then life without faith – even if it's only the mutual faith of deeply flawed human beings – is without beauty, purity, idealism or hope; and Kenwright's production, beautifully designed by Paul Farnsworth, is staged with real skill and professionalism, in a slightly subdued but thoroughly effective style.

If you want a brisk explanation of why people have come to fear a future based entirely on scientific rationalism, meanwhile, you could do worse than catch up with this week's Play, Pie and Pint offering, due at the Traverse next week. Written by Gregory Burke of Gagarin Way and Black Watch fame, Battery Farm is set in a Brave-New-World type "facility" where inconvenient oldies are kept in tanks and gradually recycled to feed the rest of humanity when their families stop visiting.

By comparison with Burke's most successful work, this play is neither hugely original nor drop-dead hilarious. What it does do, though, is to look pretty squarely at the dead end into which humanity heads, when it loses all sense of respect or wonder in the face of its own existence, and starts to take purely pragmatic views of how to maximise profit and guarantee survival; it also has a nice line on the link between that kind of dead-eyed thinking, and the euphemistic jobsworth bureaucracy that now pervades management practice, in both public and private sectors. David MacLennan's production features a performance to cherish from Andy Gray as an oldie about to receive the chop, ably supported by Alan Bissett as an archetypal bureaucrat and Denise Hoey as a secret rebel in a white coat; and if Battery Farm is hardly a work of genius, it makes its point, with typical Burkean humour and flair.

&#149 The Miracle Man is at the Tron, Glasgow, until 20 March, then tours to Musselburgh, Inverness and Aberdeen. Whistle Down The Wind is at the Playhouse, Edinburgh, until 20 March, then the King's Theatre, Glasgow, 24-29 May. Battery Farm is at Oran Mor, Glasgow, until 20 March, then at the Traverse, Edinburgh, 23-27 March.