Theatre review: Comfort Zone, Out Of The Blue

Published on Friday 12 June 2009 10:10

*** BIG business gets a blasting in this new play at the Leith Festival which looks at the way that regeneration projects are imposed by those who stand to make the greatest profit from them.

It is set in a community meeting to launch multinational company SpaZe Inc's plans to redevelop the "Harbourstone" area, the new name for Leith Docks.

The year is 2030, the tram project continues – slowly – with the latest talk to take them over the bridge to Fife; Arthur's Seat has long been built over – with a viewing platform on the summit; and SpaZe Inc are trying to convince the local community that their destruction of Leith Links will not be repeated in Harbourstone.

As a piece devised and written by the company, it is well constructed with plenty of local detail. A little more thought and effort could have made the meeting more convincing as the audience enter, but Gareth Ireland and Rob Hoon, as security guards Jim and Bert, and Ben Stollery, as the company's CEO, do well to move their audience into this new reality.

There is trouble brewing at the meeting, however. It seems that Jim is on some kind of mission to subvert the launch and is in cahoots with Claire (Susan Robinson), the pushy head of No More Spin, the PR company charged with selling the plans to the public, which gives the play enough dramatic tension to relieve the weight of its examination of political issues and local politics.

Things get even more tense as other people start on with their own ideas about opposing the plans. Julie Gunn is excellent as Jo, an architect who happens to live locally. Even more fortuitously, she was once a colleague of the scheme's main architect Chris, played by Julie Smith.

What really makes it work, however, is the way that the play freezes for moments, allowing the actors to step into flashback mode, showing how the two architects met on a demonstration to save trees from the bulldozers, or simply to show kids having a fine time playing in the open spaces – before SpaZe Inc got their hands on them.

As the truth of No More Spin's real motive is revealed, and more local people step up out of the audience to tell their stories of SpaZe Inc's abuse of power, so the message of the whole piece changes.

The issue is not so much how big businesses like SpaZe Inc are wrong, but how they can be challenged.

The play also asks whether those who do the challenging become destructive forces themselves, and whether using devious methods or even colluding with big business is right.

It ends up as a strong piece of issue-based theatre that works both as entertainment and as a call to take on responsibility for yourself.

• Run ends tomorrow

Your Review: 'You could see people's rawness'

Pat McDade, over 60, retired, Sighthill: "I thoroughly enjoyed it. It was thought-provoking and they came across well. You could see the rawness of people who had lived in the area and all the things that had happened to them, you could see their point."

Stephan Verth, 22, actor, Leith: "I thought it was very good show for being community-based. The jumps were quite big and the continuity was a bit confusing. They created good characters and I thought the two security guards were quite funny when they were pushing the protesters and trying to get them out of the meeting. It was quite believable."

Emily Dodd, 27, Leith, education officer: "I liked the interplay between the actors and the way it went back in time – especially when they were children and the serious actors suddenly became proper children, building things and playing tig and hopscotch. Julie Gunn, who played the young architect, was really passionate and convincing. Purely as entertainment, although it had a point, it was still fun to watch."