Boy Steals Train /My Arm

Boy Steals Train

ASSEMBLY ROOMS (VENUE 3)

My Arm

TRAVERSE (VENUE 15)

THERE’S a question: do affluent modern societies actually produce more people with strange compulsive behaviours and disorders? Or is it just that in times of peace and plenty we have more energy to sit and think about those who, one way or another, just don’t fit the normal pattern? These two plays – one from New York, and one from the Isle of Wight via London – both tell the stories of teenage boys with compulsive disorders, and both are powerful, effective and likeable pieces of theatre; but in ways that are fascinatingly different.

Boy Steals Train, presented in Edinburgh by a terrific six-strong cast from Paperhat Theatre Company and New York’s 78th Street Theatre Lab, is the true story of Darius McCollum, who, at the age of 15, became a folk legend around New York when he stole a subway train and drove it to the end of the line; 22 years later, after repeated arrests for stealing trains and impersonating Metropolitan Transit Authority staff, McCollum remains in jail in upstate New York, unable to stay away, whenever he has his freedom, from the mass transit systems that are his passion.

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78th Street’s show, devised by the company and directed by Jude Domski, is fast-moving, funny, poignant, humane and staged with terrific ingenuity and poise. It’s also a hopeful show, which recognises McCallum’s plight but also celebrates his strange, obsessional ability to see magic in something as banal as a subway system. It looks straight into the heart of working-class New York with an affectionate but realistic eye, as hundreds of MTA workers – from train drivers to exhausted women cleaners – learn to cut themselves a little slack by taking advantage of the boy’s illicit passion for trains. And it ends – after a rousing burst of subway-busker blues – with every member of the audience being handed a leaflet on Asperger’s Syndrome, to mark our growing understanding of what makes McCallum a special guy, rather than a criminal.

Tim Crouch’s solo show My Arm, by contrast, is a wry modern tragedy about a teenager, growing up in the Isle of Wight in the 1970s, who decides one day to put his arm in the air and never to bring it down again and, in one sense, it belongs to that slightly irritating school of yuppie theatre in which some guy born in the 1960s ambles on stage, Nick Hornby style, and invites us to sympathise with his minor consumer obsessions and with the obviously intolerable experience of having been brought up middle class and English in the 1970s.

But somehow, in its sheer sense of heartbreak, My Arm transcends the genre and matures – through a beautiful use of old home movies, a tiny live video camera and an array of displaced objects borrowed from the audience – into a truly sad and disturbing account of what happens when a man can only find a sense of identity and distinction – and eventually a bizarre kind of fame and fortune – by mutilating himself in a way that finally costs him his life.

There’s a colossally powerful metaphor here, a deep sense of social sickness and dysfunction that goes far beyond the usual hints about the ghastliness of suburban family life. And yet Crouch tells his bleak story without ever losing sight of the aching, pained humanity behind the tale – the wonderful final image of this show is so straightforwardly moving that it left many members of the audience, including me, on the brink of tears.

•Boy Steals Train, 12:25pm today, runs until 25 August;

•My Arm, 6:45pm tomorrow, runs until 23 August.

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