Theatre reviews: The Great Replacement | Titanic The Musical

Uma Nada-Rajah’s new play The Great Replacement is a telling snapshot of the desperately uncomfortable place in which western culture often now finds itself, writes Joyce McMillan

The Great Replacement, Oran Mor, Glasgow ****

Titanic The Musical, Festival Theatre, Edinburgh ****

Are you woke, or anti-woke? Whichever side you choose, in the intensely polarised public debate of the post-pandemic age, the tendency to police other people’s words and attitudes has become pervasive; and the current generation of Scottish theatre writers seem increasingly concerned about this failure of dialogue, and about the growing impulse, on all sides, to dismiss, mute or “cancel” those with whom we disagree.

The Great Replacement PIC: Tommy Ga-Ken Wan

So in Uma Nada-Rajah’s new Play, Pie And Pint drama The Great Replacement, we find ourselves in the living room of middle-aged Fi, a recently retired professional who seems to have had a lonely lockdown, and has a special relationship with a particularly cloying meditation tape. Her slightly estranged daughter Lu appears at the door, to announce that she and her female partner have decided to have a child, using a sperm donation from her old friend Kal, whose family is originally from Pakistan.

The point of the play – embodied in a brilliant, complex and funny central performance by the great Irene Macdougall – is that while Fi considers herself a liberal soul, well equal to accepting the new world her daughter inhabits, in fact she just can’t help lapsing into more reactionary attitudes. She has already had some kind of terminal fall-out with Lu’s partner, asks Kal where he comes from (Glasgow, of course), and is appalled to find, when she gets her DNA tested, that she is 12 per cent Senegalese.

All of this is both shrewdly and entertainingly observed in Nada-Rajah’s clever 50-minute drama, sharply directed by Jemima Levick. The play features two fine supporting performances from Hannah Donaldson as Lu, and from Adam Buksh, who, as Kal, just can’t resist goading Fi with chat about some current bizarre conspiracy theories, including the idea – popular among white supremacists – that other races are plotting to “replace” white people completely. And if it lacks any very decisive conclusion, that uncertainty only adds to its power as a snapshot of the desperately uncomfortable place in which western culture often now finds itself; a portrait as funny and telling as it is disturbing.

In Titanic The Musical, by contrast – playing briefly and eerily at the Festival Theatre, in this week of the desperate search for the lost Titan submersible – western culture at its most arrogant and overweening is hauled to the bar of history, and handed a resounding guilty verdict. Created, by chance, in the same year as the blockbuster film, Maury Yeston and Peter Stone’s intense 1997 musical drama might have been designed to disappoint those looking for a re-run of the Kate-and-Leo screen romance, and to thrill those who love an intense and well-structured tragedy, packed to the gunwales with passion and politics.

Titanic the Musical PIC: Pamela Raith Photography

From its first few notes, Titanic The Musical frames the great ship as a microcosm of the society that created it; obsessed with its own technical prowess, intensely competitive, and riddled from top to bottom – from A Deck to steerage – with vicious and finally fatal distinctions of class and wealth. As the ship begins to founder, Captain, owner and designer exchange bitter recriminations over exactly whose fault it was that Titanic – with dangerously lowered bulkheads, and fewer than half the lifeboats specified in its design – was racing along an ice-plagued northerly route at reckless speed, rather than proceeding more cautiously.

Around them surge a terrific cast of characters of all classes, each one vividly drawn and sung; and as the Titanic tragedy swirls to its spectacular conclusion, the audience rises to its feet to cheer the show’s terrific 25-strong ensemble, in a story whose resonances for our own time could hardly be more obvious, or more compelling.

The Great Replacement is at Oran Mor, Glasgow, until 24 June, Macrobert Arts Centre, Stirling, 29 June until 1 July, and Pitlochry Festival Theatre, 3-8 July. Titanic The Musical is at the Festival Theatre, Edinburgh, until 24 June.