Theatre review: Theatre Works 2011

New Works 2011

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HOW do you review a show that bores you to distraction for two long hours, and then suddenly leaps into dramatic life in the final 20 minutes? It’s a tough one; but that’s what you get in the first of these two double bills of new work presented by masters’ students at the Conservatoire Of Scotland (formerly RSAMD), and alternating at the Traverse until Saturday.

In theory, it makes good sense for the Conservatoire to commission short plays from leading Scottish writers for this final show by an international group of students, mainly from Britain and North America; but in practice, the results are disappointing. The Bends is an inexplicably dull and repetitive 50-minute drama by Ian F. Macleod - presented in stuffy 1950s-British-rep style - in which an irritating executive type called Adam decides to have his brain frozen on his death, but remains just as boring in his defrosted afterlife as he was in this one.

Things improve a little after the interval, when we plunge into parts one and two of a promised trilogy by Pamela Carter on the revolutionary virtues of liberty, equality and fraternity. Liberty is an interesting attempt at a 50-minute play about the idea of sexual freedom, embodied in a good-hearted provincial swingers’ club called Liberty’s.

However it seems sprawling and unfocussed compared with the short final piece Equality, which suddenly homes in on the reality of recent Scottish politics, and on a fictionalised version of the moment when any hopes invested in the Scottish Socialist Party were destroyed by revelations about the leader’s private life.

In a teashop near the parliament, the Tommy Sheridan character and his chief adviser confront one another, staring into the abyss of political oblivion; and even when filtered - slightly startlingly - through the American voices of actors David Pica and Joseph Hawkins, Deborah Hannan’s production develops a sharp edge of meaning and dramatic urgency, casting the rest of the evening’s performances into the shade.

JOYCE MCMILLAN