Theatre reviews: Someone Who’ll Watch Over Me

SOMEONE WHO’LL WATCH OVER ME

Perth Theatre

Rating: ****

MWANA

Tron Theatre, Glasgow

Rating: ***

AS THE WEST seems doomed to re-learn every decade – in Iraq, or Afghanistan, or now Libya – the imperial impulse is a folly that exacts a terrible, lingering price, first from those who are colonised, and then, in the fullness of time, from those who once thought of themselves as their masters. It’s difficult to believe that it’s now more than a quarter of a century since the Irishman Brian Keenan and the Englishman John McCarthy were taken hostage in Beirut, and thrown into captivity in a series of grim cellars and rooms across the city’s southern suburbs.

Yet as Frank McGuinness’s magnificent 1992 play Someone Who’ll Watch Over Me, based on their ordeal makes clear, no pair of western hostages were ever more acutely aware of their position in history; of the enduring reasons why westerners in the Middle East are seen as legitimate targets by some armed groups, and of the rage that drives such action.

In their own relationship – between the working-class boy from Belfast who held an Irish passport and the impeccably restrained British public-school journalist – they often re-enacted the drama of cultural dominance, resentment, fury and eventual resolution that is the whole story of colonialism; and Keenan in particular, in his powerful book An Evil Cradling, showed a rare and subtle ability to tell that story from both sides.

McGuinness’s play – now given a powerful and commanding mainstage production at Perth by the theatre’s new artistic director, Rachel O’Riordan – is a fictionalised version of the story told in Keenan’s book, in which the Irishman Edward and the Englishman Michael first share their prison with an American, Adam, and then have to come to terms with his sudden disappearance, and likely death.

Presented in a series of sharply-divided scenes, spread out over the four-and-a-half years of Edward’s captivity, the relationship between the two men is full of sharp twists and turns, sudden outbreaks of fury – particularly on Edward’s side – and slow resolutions.

McGuinnness is particularly brilliant in demonstrating that it’s the human ability to tell stories and sing songs – to remember, imagine, reconstruct, parody, recite, confabulate, perform – that both ensures their survival as thinking and feeling human beings, and gradually enables them, despite their differences, to become true friends and comrades.

The play also contains a powerful strand of gender politics, as McGuinness explores – with his characteristic mix of soaring poetry and fierce, earthy dialogue – the forbidden territory of tenderness and love among men who are not gay, and who are not themselves soldiers, but who begin to feel the same deep physical and emotional connection as groups of male warriors in battle. O’Riordan’s production is superbly designed by Gary McCann – who makes a fine, open dramatic space of what is nonetheless a claustrophobic room inhabited by three men chained to radiators – and exquisitely lit by Chahine Yavroyan. And it features a fine, perfectly calibrated performance from Joseph Chance as the doomed Adam, alongside a truly brave one from Robert Morgan as Michael, who begins as a hopeless stereotype of a teddy-hugging English academic, and gradually emerges as a deeply strong and admirable human being.

The centrepiece, though, is a truly unforgettable tour de force from Stephen Kennedy as Edward; the man who contains within himself all the contradictions of the colonial age; who can be cruel and vengeful and bullying and spiteful, but who also has within him the power of poetry, imagination and empathy that makes change possible, and can finally redeem and transform evil itself into some kind of hope.

Ankur Productions’ new show Mwana – a first play by Glasgow-based Zimbabwean writer Tawona Sithole – also touches on the history of imperialism, and on the imploding life of a young African student sent to study in Glasgow who is increasingly unable to meet his parents’ demands for western-style success and achievement.

The play – featuring a cast of five and a chorus of four – opens as Mwana and his Scottish girlfriend, Kirsten, arrive back in Harare for Mwana’s brother’s wedding; but from the outset, the visit is uneasy, as Kirsten begins to realise that Mwana’s parents know nothing of her, and that Mwana himself has been playing strange double games, buying her ticket for the trip with money that was meant for a very different purpose.

Despite a powerful theme, though – and some beautiful design and lighting by Ricardo Pardo and Kai Fischer – Shabina Aslam’s first production as Ankur’s artistic director looks more like a tentative opening-up of the subject than a fully finished show.

The text combines poetry, domestic drama, song and dance in a mix that is sometimes electrifying, but often uneasy and self-conscious: the actors often seem unsure whether they’re playing a straight family drama or a stylised surrealist fantasy, and the chorus hover around with baskets of fruit, like extras from a tourism advert.

The result is play that offers neither a straightforward narrative of Mwana’s troubled life in Glasgow, nor a wholehearted critique of Africa’s long love affair with western culture and lifestyle, nor a dream-like celebration of Zimbabwe’s mongrel culture, part African tradition, part western glitz and glitter.

It does, though, contain tantalisingly vivid elements of all three possibilities; and a couple of fine performances, too, from Moses Hardwick as sensible brother Joe, and Denver Isaac as Mwana himself, a boy-man caught between Africa and the west, and almost engulfed by the depth of the cultural divide he is somehow expected to negotiate, and to survive.

• Someone Who’ll Watch Over Me is at Perth Theatre until 25 February. Mwana is at the Tron, Glasgow, until Saturday, and the Traverse, Edinburgh, 22-25 February.

Performance of the week

No ifs, no buts, just head for Perth, to see Stephen Kennedy’s magnificently complex and charismatic performance as Edward, the Irish hostage in Frank McGuinness’s fine 1992 drama Somone Who’ll Watch Over Me. He’s not always loveable, or even bearable, but this character is a human being at the limit of endurance, showing just what our species can achieve in the way of survival, imagination, forgiveness, and wild, redemptive humour.

Theatre reviews: Someone Who’ll Watch Over Me | Mwana