Theatre reviews: Jennie Lee: Tomorrow is a New Day | Ghost Off

Angus-based company Knights Theatre are celebrating the 120th anniversary of the birth of trailblazing MP Jennie Lee with a complex and thoughtful new play, writes Joyce McMillan

Jennie Lee: Tomorrow is a New Day | Robin Mitchell

Jennie Lee: Tomorrow is a New Day, Lochgelly Centre ★★★

Ghost Off, Oran Mor, Glasgow ★★

When Jennie Lee was first elected MP for North Lanarkshire in 1929 she was, at 24, the youngest woman ever to sit in the Commons, and too young to vote in her own election. Legislation extending the vote to all women over 21 did not come into force until later that year; and those twin battles – to improve the lot of working-class communities like the Fife mining towns where she was raised, and to make women’s voices heard in what was still an overwhelmingly male-dominated world – were to define her long life in politics, which ended only with her death in 1988.

These two struggles are still powerfully present in our politics today. It’s that fact – among others – that makes it so satisfying to see small Angus-based company Knights Theatre celebrating this week’s 120th anniversary of Jennie Lee’s birth with a complex and thoughtful new full-length play, Jennie Lee: Tomorrow is a New Day. Premiered in her birthplace, Lochgelly, over the weekend, it explores the tensions of her life partly through a recurring dialogue between the radical younger Jennie, powerfully played by Kit Laveri, and the more pragmatic older politician, captured by Trish Mullin.

This multi-layered show - prepared and workshopped extensively over the last few years - also contains some strong showbiz elements of song and surreal comedy, many of them delivered by third cast member George Docherty in roles that range from Jennie’s miner father to Winston Churchill, and include an upper-class dancing devil of a right-wing Fleet Street journalist, whose antics dog Jenny and her husband, NHS founder Nye Bevan, throughout their political careers.

There are times, during this two-hour evening, when the sheer multi-stranded complication of the play seems almost too much both for Matthew Knights’s script – which often jolts awkwardly between styles and genres, even framing Jennie’s sensational arrival at Westminster as an early television-style dating show, as men vie for her favours – and for Emma Lynne Harley’s production, which, with only three actors on stage, never quite achieves the stellar levels of pace, sophistication and slickness needed to cope with those shifts, or to capture the sheer charismatic glamour of Jennie and Nye at the height of their fame.

In the end, though, it’s impossible not to love the play for its passion, and its soaring, restless ambition. And for the vital role it is playing, this autumn, in reminding Fifers of the story of one of the most remarkable women ever born there – one whose words and achievements, not least the founding of the Open University, still point the way forward to that brighter tomorrow for which Jennie Lee worked, hoped and dreamed, all her life.

Julie Coombe, Afton Moran and Esme Bayley in Ghost Off | Tommy Ga-Ken Wan

At Oran Mor, meanwhile, the Play, Pie and Pint season takes a Hallowe’en swerve towards the totally trivial with James Peake’s Ghost Off, a daft ghost story for the Youtube era.

Imagine Noel Coward, without the wit or way with words, trying to write a 2020’s version of Blithe Spirit set in a cramped and stuffy flat somewhere off Byres Road, and you will sense something of the atmosphere of Peake’s slightly overlong play, in which dodgy medium Madame Anne-Marie Bain-Marie (played with commendable energy by Julie Coombe) tries to lure credulous punters to her flat to be spooked by her son Connor dressed up as a Victorian ghost-girl.

Chaos follows nonsense when journalist Molly turns up, intent on making a YouTube film that will expose Madame Anne-Marie’s frauds, and accidental murder and mayhem ensue.

Little of it makes sense, some of the throwaway lines are entertaining, and Afton Moran turns in a sharp slapstick performance as Connor, with strong support from Esme Bailey as Molly. All in all, though, Ghost Off is just a tad too silly to be satisfying; and a shade depressing, in its truly transcendental cynicism.