Theatre review: Sins of the Father

THE wind howls, and the house is as cold and bleak as any dank, neglected cottage on a remote Scottish hillside. If a man has been living here, he has been allowing himself few comforts. It’s into this chill space that Emma James steps, at the beginning of Tom Murray’s intense play. A bitter young woman visibly shaking with anger, she waits for the man who lives here, and it turns out, after a few minutes of conversation almost strangled by her rage and his fear, that he is the son of the man who, 20 years ago, viciously murdered her mother in this same glen.

It’s a brilliant situation, full of possibilities for debate on crime, punishment, sin and redemption. A generation ago, most people would have considered it obvious that Robert Preston Junior – superbly played here by Jordan Young, opposite Lesley Hart’s equally fine Emma – carries no responsibility for his father’s crime, committed when he was only eight, but in our new age of genetic determinism, both he and Emma seem seized by the conviction that any ordinary anger he feels, or violent impulse he experiences, signals that he, too, is a killer at heart.

Murray doesn’t quite succeed in developing the full dramatic potential of his story; the mood is too relentlessly miserable to allow for any glimmer of hope, the end too grimly sensational. The play stands, though, as a useful warning about the horror of any creed that allows for no redemption, and no change.