Review: An Appointment With The Wicker Man

IF WHAT you want from the National Theatre of Scotland is dignity, good taste and a series of solid classic texts elegantly produced, then my advice is to stay away from their latest mainstage show, directed by the company’s boundary-busting artistic director, Vicky Featherstone.

If, on the other hand, you just enjoy a laugh, then An Appointment With The Wicker Man could be just the thing to tickle your ribs on a cold February night, as it travels on from Aberdeen to Glasgow, Inverness and Dunfermline.

Conceived by writers Greg Hemphill and Donald McLeary (of Still Game and Chewin’ The Fat) as a response to Robin Hardy’s 1973 cult film The Wicker Man, the show takes the form of a spoof, involving a slightly complex double narrative. Where the film features an earnest young policeman arriving on a remote Scottish island to investigate the apparent disappearance of a child, Hemphill and McLeary’s version involves a young professional actor arriving from Glasgow to take on the policeman’s role in a production of The Wicker Man being staged by the Loch Parry Players, the am-dram stars of a similarly remote community.

As a piece of writing, though, An Appointment With The Wicker Man never takes full advantage of the situation. In a story ripe with possibilities for hard-hitting humour about the cultural changes we have undergone since the early 1970s, and about the way Scottish settings are used and stereotyped in films, what we mainly get is some fairly predictable stuff about village sexual shenanigans, hardly cutting-edge and for long periods in the play’s first half not really that funny; and the talented cast sometimes seem to be struggling to make entertaining comic business out of a script that offers lmited scope.

Where the show achieves some sparkle, though, is in the rapid-fire ease with which it handles the debris of 21st-century popular culture, and in the energy with which it reworks, sends up and enjoys the visual and musical elements of the Wicker Man story.

The music in particular – cleverly adapted by Martin Lowe and Giles Thomas from the original film score – has a driving energy that lends itself both to satire and to the odd moment of real drama; and the cast come alive when the songs, and Imogen Knight’s witty choreography, give them some worthwhile material to work on.

An Appointment With The Wicker Man is an enjoyable show with a few good one-line jokes; and it makes its point that small communities are as clannish as ever. The script, though, comes nowhere near the brilliance of the best comic writing for the Scottish stage.

And until the NTS can find a new generation of mainstage writers, its shows will inevitably struggle to make much impact, or to rank with the very best.

His Majesty’s Theatre, Aberdeen

Rating: ***