Theatre reviews: Dinnerladies/Pobby and Dingan/Heaven

THE only consistent rule of successful theatre is that there are no rules; that as soon as anyone sets up a formula for artistic or commercial success, some glorious show comes along that completely smashes the template, and achieves magnificence anyway.

This week's three theatrical offerings at the King's and Traverse Theatres in Edinburgh could hardly be more different, in style, in form, and perhaps in aspiration. And yet every one of them delivers a fierce blast of theatrical energy, and an experience worth treasuring; not magnificence, perhaps, but poetry, humanity and fun.

In Victoria Wood's Dinnerladies at the King's Theatre, the style is good old-fashioned popular sitcom, reassuring in structure, hilarious in detail, and sentimental in exactly the way John McGrath, the great theorist of the form, says popular theatre can afford to be.

Designed as a stage tribute to Wood's popular television series – which ran for 16 episodes between 1998 and 2000 – Dinnerladies has been sharply reshaped for the stage by director David Graham. It focuses on the storyline of the second series, featuring the midlife romance between Wood's own character, the hard-working and self-deprecating Bren, and Tony the catering manager, who has had a brush with cancer. And if the happy ending of that story seems predestined from the start – so much so that the mainly elderly audience sighs in delight, and offers up a round of applause when Bren and Tony finally manage a shy kiss – it's the lethally well observed detail of Wood's often brilliant script that transforms the show from cheesy and tedious romance, to genuine document of working-class life at the end of the industrial age.

Bound together by their common experience of television shows and movies, Wood's team of nine eccentric and sharply drawn characters in a works canteen already seem like figures from an earlier time, when solidarity came more easily; memories of The Rag Trade and On The Buses hover around the stage, and even of Arnold Wesker's The Kitchen. And we're not talking subtlety here, either. There's plenty of traditional seaside postcard humour, starting with backchat about Stan the caretaker "adjusting his nuts", and heading straight on down into an ancient thicket of double entendres.

In the end, though, Wood is a fine writer, both nostalgic and postmodern in the surreal collisions she arranges between a grand tradition of British popular entertainment, and a new world dominated by fast food, celebrity culture, and multiple TV channels. She makes a fine case for the unfashionable truth that ordinary working people – trying to snatch a bit of happiness in unglamorous lives in a low-wage service economy – deserve to be entertained, to have their voices heard, and to have tribute paid to the sense of humour that, for millions, makes a routine working day bearable and even enjoyable.

In David Graham's deftly-shaped production, Andrew Dunn reprises his original TV role as Tony, with Laura Shepherd turning in a lovely, heartfelt performance as Bren; but the whole Dinnerladies team deserve a bouquet, for perfectly recapturing the spirit of the original show, and transforming it into live theatre that works, and lifts the heart.

Over at the Traverse this week, meanwhile, the much-admired Catherine Wheels company – one of Scotland's top theatre groups for children – are continuing their current tour of Pobby and Dingan, a new stage version by Rob Evans of the award-winning children's story by Australian-based writer Ben Rice. Set in the remote outback mining town of Lightning Ridge, this 80-minute show tells the story of young Ashmol Williamson, his sister Kellyanne, and her two imaginary friends, Pobby and Dingan, who go missing one day, causing Kellyanne to take to her bed with what seems like a broken heart.

Pobby and Dingan is a strange story, which resolutely refuses to follow a classic sentimental pattern. Ashmol's quest is successful, yet he loses his prize; everyone in town behaves as if Pobby and Dingan are real, yet only a few believe in the right kind of way. Yet what emerges from Gill Robertson's beautiful production – which marshals music (by David Paul Jones), puppetry, and all the visual resources of theatre, to evoke the physical and social landscape of Lightning Ridge, and to tell this complex story, with a cast of just four – is a really moving meditation on the power of imagination to conjure what is not conventionally real, and to recreate what has gone.

There's some fine acting here, from Scott Turnbull, Ashley Smith, Damien Warren-Smith and Ros Sydney. If the show's concerns are perhaps a shade too deep for younger children, it's a richly fulfilling experience for everyone over seven or eight, and for adult audiences, too.

And downstairs in Traverse Two, this spring's transfer season of Play, Pie and Pint lunchtime shows from Oran Mor in Glasgow kicks off with a re-run of Simon Stephens's strange and resonant 30-minute airport dialogue Heaven, meticulously directed by Dominic Hill, and featuring a truly staggering final performance of the Talking Heads song of the same name by stars Sean Scanlan and Barbara Rafferty. Stephens's powerful, poetic text – about death, escape, and the violence that underpins all our affluence – looks even stronger than it did at the Traverse last August. As for the pies, the Traverse knocks Oran Mor into a cocked hat by offering a choice of four – old-fashioned mutton, macaroni, or two kinds of haggis. And although they call the mutton one "the Oran Mor", it has to be said that Oran Mor has never served a traditional mutton pie in its whole six years. The pies there are steak or veggie, and that's your lot; even if – unlike at the genteel Traverse – you do get to eat them during the show.

Dinnerladies is at the King's Theatre, Edinburgh, until Saturday. Pobby and Dingan is at the Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh, until Saturday, and on tour until 1 April. Heaven is at the Traverse Theatre until Saturday.