Theatre reviews: Decky Does a Bronco

THE Fife Circle train chugs out of Edinburgh across the Forth Bridge, and gradually begins to wind its way into the heart of what used to be the Fife coalfield. The towns are small and a shade depressed-looking, but the landscape is pretty, and as we pull up at Cardenden there are cornfields blowing in the July breeze, and soft hills in the near distance, just beyond the twin village of Bowhill.

It's not a place without a dramatic tradition, this part of Fife; back in the 1930s, these two villages, and their strong amateur drama group, produced Joe Corrie, the miner and playwright who wrote Gold In His Boots.

Today, though, I'm not travelling to a miner's institute or community hall. I'm going to the park beside the bowling green in Bowhill, to watch one of the finest plays to emerge from a Scottish working-class story in the last ten years. The play is Douglas Maxwell's Decky Does a Bronco, born out of his own childhood in Girvan in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and first seen in 2000. It's set around the swings in a park exactly like the one it appears in today. It explores what happens when grown-up tragedy swamps the lives of a group of five nine-year-old boys who compete and tussle together around these swings, unaware that their playful, experimental fighting and bullying may, just once in a blue moon, create space into which real-life evil can move. And it was the genius of Edinburgh-based site-specific company Grid Iron - ten years ago, and again in this powerful revival - to take the chance of performing the play outdoors, in the context where it was born.

A decade on, Decky Does a Bronco still looks like a play almost too complex to stand the strain of outdoor performance, particularly in an environment where it's impossible to enforce the over-12 age limit that suits its subject-matter. The double presence of three of the characters - played as children and adults by different actors - can be difficult to decode; the briefest of failures in the actors' face-mics can leave subtle text drowned by the sound of the wind.

Yet still, the sheer force and depth of Maxwell's study of an end of childhood, and an abrupt loss of innocence, brings tears to the eyes. Ben Harrison's production is more thrillingly physical than ever, as his eight adult actors spring onto their specially strengthened swings, work up to the bumps, and fly off onto the grass in a perfect "bronco", leaving the swing and its chain to twirl into a perfect roll around the top-bar.

There are some outstanding performances, not least from Martin McCormick as the narrator David, John Kielty and Gavin Wright as the two incarnations of his street-fighting pal Chrissy, and a troubled, English-accented Ben Winger as little Decky, the tiny kid who just doesn't fit in, and who can't do a bronco to save his life. After a decade in which the debate around child safety and loss of freedom has only become more acute, Decky Does a Bronco seems a more timely play than ever; and the writing is beautiful, doggedly examining the mental tricks we perform, in the effort to forget the horror that sometimes intrudes into our lives, or to try to make sense of it all.

If Douglas Maxwell's play stays true to an old Scottish tradition of working-class intellectualism and self-questioning, Robert Harling's Steel Magnolias - famous for that 1989 film version starring Dolly Parton and Julia Roberts, and now revived in the tiny Tron Changing House by new Glasgow company Upstage Theatre - belongs to another grand old tradition of popular drama, featuring gay male empathy for strong women in tough situations. Set in Truvy Jones's hair salon in a small town in Louisiana, Harling's story lays on the schmaltz as it shows its cast of six women - including Truvy herself, her born again assistant Annelle, her best customer M'Lynn, and M'Lynn's lovely but fragile daughter Shelby - helping each other survive some of the toughest stuff life can throw at us, from raw bereavement to the loneliness of old age.

For all its wordy sentimentality, though, Steel Magnolias is also sharp-witted, good-hearted and sometimes fiercely accurate in its understanding of the quiet depths of female solidarity; oddly, it sometimes seemed to me like a Deep South version of Tony Roper's The Steamie, with its emphasis on women coming together amid the splash of water and detergents to talk through their imperfect lives and unhappy marriages, and give each other strength. In the confined space of the Changing House, this big play - with a vivid naturalistic set by Peter Screen - generates sauna-like levels of heat; and the acting in Angela Darcy's production is sometimes a little uneven and old-fashioned, with too much hand-waving.

Yet Isabel Joss turns in a very fine performance as Truvy, the hard-working linchpin of this little community, with Lucy Mills on frightening form as Annelle, the chubby assistant who falls prey to a scarily unhelpful form of Christian fundamentalism.

And although Carmen Pieraccini, as Shelby, only has to appear pretty, lively and poignantly vulnerable, she brings real depth and thought to the job, helping to round out a show that has already established itself as a small-scale treat on the girls' night out circuit, and which should, if there's any justice, have a fine commercial future ahead of it.

• Decky Does a Bronco is at Lochgelly today, Ballingry tomorrow, and Crosshill on Saturday, East Fife and North-East Scotland until 22 July, Dundee Rep from 23-24 July and at the Edinburgh Fringe, Traverse@Scotland Yard Playground, from 6-21 August.

• Steel Magnolias is at the Tron, Glasgow, until 10 July.

Theatre reviews: Decky Does a Bronco | Steel Magnolias