Theatre reviews: The Mystery of Irma Vep | Year of the Horse | Will Shu

Published on Thursday 26 February 2009 19:38

THE MYSTERY OF IRMA VEP ** ROYAL LYCEUM, EDINBURGH YEAR OF THE HORSE **** TRON, GLASGOW WILL SHU *** ORAN MOR, GLASGOW

HOW thrilled are you, in 2009, by the sight of a male actor dressed up as a woman? And how excited are you by tacky horror movies, as a genre to be lovingly sent up? If your answer to both questions is "not very", then the Royal Lyceum Theatre this month is not the place for you, because for some reason Mark Thomson of the Lyceum and Ian Grieve of Perth Theatre have joined forces to inflict on their audiences one of the most overrated pieces of camp foolery ever to emerge from the New York theatre scene of the 1980s.

Charles Ludlam's The Mystery Of Irma Vep was first seen off Broadway in 1984, and rapidly became a cult hit. Set in a country house called Mandacrest, the play represents a strange collision between the worlds of Daphne Du Maurier, the Marx Brothers, and Night of the Living Dead, as the new Lady Hillcrest battles to lift a curse brought down on the house by her Egyptologist husband Edgar, and his spooky first wife Irma Vep (spot the anagram).

The joke is that the story features eight characters all played by the same two actors, who must be of the same sex. Cue much opportunity for showbiz hilarity, as two big, hairy men – in this case, Scottish stage and small-screen stars Andy Gray and Steven McNicoll – fling themselves through a series of outrageous costumes, strangulated voices and silly walks.

The problem with …Irma Vep, though, is that it just isn't a sharp enough satire to sustain its two-hour length. The film genres Ludlam sends up have plenty to say about class, power and empire, and about sex and violence; some of those themes might even be illuminated by a bit of cross-dressing. But Ludlam can't even decide whether his subject is supernatural horror or ordinary human wickedness; instead, he relies on the raw theatrical impact of men in skirts to reduce at least some of the audience to hysterics, and then busks through a feeble skit on familiar horror-movie scenarios that would barely sustain a ten-minute sketch

McNicoll and Gray give this turkey of a show their all, with Gray producing some of the finest theatrical double-takes ever seen on a Scottish stage. But the play itself is so void of meaning that it soon becomes screamingly dull to anyone not obsessed with the minutiae of horror-film references or continuously thrilled by the sight of men in frocks. I'm all for a bit of silliness, but the boredom is unforgivable, and wasting good Scottish theatrical expertise on such weak material is enough to make a strong woman weep.

The Scottish-based cartoonist Richard Horne – known professionally as Harry Horse – died two years ago, under circumstances so tragic that they have tended to divert attention away from his work. Now, though, actor and activist Tam Dean Burn has stepped into the breach with Year Of The Horse, a timely reminder of the sheer awe- inspiring power of the text and drawings that Horne was producing during the last year of his life, after he was asked to write short pieces of prose to accompany the images he was creating each week for a Scottish newspaper.

The result is a show that Burn himself describes as being more of an exhibition than a play. On a dark stage, Horne's last 52 nightmare images of a world riven by war and terror are projected on screen, while Burn – like a slim 21st-century urban angel in white hoodie and jeans – speaks the accompanying text.

The politics is blazingly contemptuous of the Bush-Blair era; the images are ferocious and unforgettable (the depth of literary and artistic reference, from William Blake to Munch and Bosch, is startling and moving) and the poetic quality of Horne's writing, backed by a muted, chilling score from Keith McIvor, is almost frightening. And although Year Of The Horse exists in the debatable lands between theatre and visual art, it is likely to emerge – in Edinburgh this August – as one of the most powerful Scottish theatre pieces of the year.

There's a terrific pulse of poetry, too, in this week's Oran Mor lunchtime show, Will Shu, by Shetland writer Jacqeline Clark. In what feels like a 30-minute fragment of a much bigger drama, three women gather on a Shetland beach. Brenda and Jess are a mother and daughter riven by grief over the drowning as a child of Jess's little sister; Maggie, from a different time, is one of the women who lost all her menfolk in the Delting disaster of 1900, when 22 fishermen were drowned in a storm.

The power of the play depends on the actors' capacity to draw the audience into the world embodied in the characters' language; and it's perhaps significant that Pauline Lynch, as the historical figure Maggie, achieves this most perfectly, while Anne Lacey and Claire Yuille struggle to achieve a balance between tradition and modernity.

The dramatic potential of Clark's work is huge, though, and without the true, hard and beautiful far-northern voice in which she speaks, the pattern of Scottish theatre seems incomplete.

&#149 The Mystery Of Irma Vep is at the Royal Lyceum until 14 March, and at Perth Theatre 19 March-4 April. Year of the Horse and Will Shu both run until tomorrow.