Theatre review: Red Dust Road, Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh

It’s unusual to see an Edinburgh International Festival show – produced, in this case, by the National Theatre of Scotland and HOME Manchester – take such a profound wrong turning in its very inception that even the best efforts of a dedicated cast cannot entirely save it.

Sasha Frost as Jackie Kay in Red Dust Road, a flawed production based on the poets memoir. Picture: Richard Davenport

Red Dust Road, Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh * * *

Something like that has happened, though, with Red Dust Road, the new stage version of Scottish poet Jackie Kay’s powerful memoir about her search for her birth parents, and particularly for her Nigerian father.


The problem is that Kay’s book has a winding, weaving poetic structure, held together by her distinctive authorial voice, that works beautifully on the page, but is more problematic on stage; particularly since playwright Tanika Gupta and director Dawn Walton have made a decision to retain that complex structure, yet not to use a strong narrator’s voice to drive the drama.


Elsewhere, though – and despite a gorgeous set design by Simon Kenny, featuring a huge gilt frame twining into a deep tree-root – this potentially fascinating story of race, identity and the legacy of colonialism just wanders the stage as if in search of a central narrative, or a conflict to be resolved; in what often seems like a faint theatrical shadow of a fine book that’s several scenes too long.

Until 18 August

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