Theatre Reviews - Primitive forces

Published on Thursday 30 October 2008 19:16

COCKROACH **** TRAVERSE, EDINBURGH MIDSUMMER **** TRAVERSE, EDINBURGH MARY ROSE **** ROYAL LYCEUM, EDINBURGH

AS ANY teacher will tell you, a classroom full of rampaging 15-year-olds is a prime arena for the study of the more animal aspects of human nature, and the primitive forces of aggression, competition and lust. Almost from the first moments of Sam Holcroft's Cockroach, though, it becomes clear that this searing debut play – the first of four in the current Traverse/National Theatre of Scotland series – is something much more than another routine social comedy about a harassed teacher trying to impose civilisation of a roomful of roaring teenage hormones.

The play begins with a bang, as wild girl Leah locks herself into the classroom; she is fleeing from her boyfriend Lee, who is angry with her because she has caught him having sex with lonely, disorientated Mmoma, the only black girl in the class. Then there's Leah's pretty best friend Danielle, already exhausted at 15 by more predatory male attention than she can bear; and her nice admirer Davey, whose passion for her takes a frighteningly possessive turn. And bringing up the rear is the teacher, Beth, permanently linked by radio to the school's referral base for out-of-control kids.

Inside the classroom, though, Beth's efforts to impose order and encourage intellectual endeavour are strangely contradicted by the content of her classes about Darwinian evolution, hormones and natural selection. And outside the classroom, war rages ever closer to the school gates – a war halfheartedly condoned by the teacher as part of her role as a state employee, while boys begin to disappear into the armed forces, and to die.

The play builds, in other words, into a nightmare vision of the collapse of civilisation, in which the teacher is often oddly and helplessly complicit with the process of disintegration that is devastating the lives of her pupils; and in which the all-too-familiar confrontation between the codes of conduct which the school tries to enforce, and those which are rife in the world outside, is hurtling towards crisis point.

But in the end, Holcroft's play loses track of itself slightly, wandering off once too often into Mmoma's strange fantasy life – a ten-minute cut in the second half would do this demanding play no harm. But Featherstone's direction is immaculate, and the performances by a young, mainly Scottish cast stunningly clear and subtle, with Meg Fraser's inspired turn as the teacher only the best of a breathtakingly fine bunch.

And in the end, it's hard to forget the terrible force of Holcroft's vision of a society gradually and unwittingly eating away at the theoretical base on which its whole peaceful existence rests; and finally flipping in an instant – as in the chilling second half of Sarah Kane's Blasted – from our recognisable, everyday reality, into a new world in which every kind of primitive fundamentalism and raging brutality becomes not only possible, but likely.

There are plenty of primitive forces at work, too, in David Greig and Gordon McIntyre's Midsummer, the first in the informal Traverse Too season of off-the-cuff studio shows.

It begins with a couple propelled into bed in a Marchmont flat by naked, drunken, Friday-night lust. Here, though, the tone is one of warm-hearted, beautifully-sculpted musical romantic comedy, as Greig and McIntyre (of top Edinburgh band ballboy) shape the tale of unlikely couple Bob and Helena, a pair of tired 35-year-olds on the loose in a city centre wine-bar, into a lost-weekend love story that somehow succeeds in being romantic and often moving, without losing a sharp, perceptive edge of satirical comment on the way we live now.

Like a good Ian Rankin novel, the play conducts the kind of intense, almost poetic love affair with the city of Edinburgh, its light and its fabric, that Greig hasn't indulged in since his lovely devolution drama Caledonia Dreaming, a decade ago. And its use of McIntyre's songs is fascinating, as both Bob and Helena – the heartbreakingly beautiful and talented Cora Bissett, and the equally lovely Matthew Pidgeon – pick up their battered guitars and sing. The music, in other words, seems like something that belongs to them, domestic, unpretentious, from the heart; rather than big "production numbers", the music from elsewhere that once used to sweep stage musical lovers up in its current, but is now – perhaps – being replaced by something less grandiose, more empowering, and more true.

Over at Edinburgh's Royal Lyceum, meanwhile, director Tony Cownie and a strikingly well-chosen cast tackle J M Barrie's haunting 1920 ghost story, Mary Rose – if you want a real, heart-lurching chiller of a Halloween drama, then the Lyceum is the place to be this weekend.

It's worth acknowledging that Mary Rose is one of the oddest plays ever written, the story of a much-loved only daughter twice half-taken by death, only to be brutally returned to a world that has moved on without her. Its mixture of wise, kindly observation – notably around the figures of Mary Rose's grieving but surviving parents – and macabre obsession with the horror of death can be downright distressing, and its high Edwardian style often seems stilted and arch.

As productions of Mary Rose go, though, it's difficult to imagine a better one than this deft, thoughtful and heartfelt staging, which features Una McLean as the haunted housekeeper Mrs Otery, and a beautifully-cast Kim Gerard as Mary Rose, alive and yet dead. The message – as in many modern ghost stories – is that the dead cannot and should not return, and that life must move on. But if Barrie had fully believed that himself, then this strange, heart-clutching play probably would not exist; and certainly would not retain such a chilling, clinging power.

&149 Cockroach until tomorrow; Midsummer until 15 November; Mary Rose until 15 November.