Theatre
SpectreTown
Brunton Theatre, Musselburgh
Mary Brennan
TWO STARS
Language and culture – in this case the Doric tongue and bothy ballads of Scotland’s North East communities – inspired and shape Elspeth Turner’s play about the sins of a long dead rural father blighting a modern urban family. The various threads that she brings together on-stage for her Stoirm Og company get sorely tangled however – not least when the “inbetween” dimension of a parallel universe is hinted at, or the past literally haunts the present in spooky happenings and live sound effects by musician Matt Regan.
Kai Fischer’s lighting more or less dissolves the set – a ramshackle second hand shop – from the here and now into a shadowy darkness for the opening section where Meg (Elspeth Turner) and Doddie (Mark Wood) begin their courtship. It’s the early 1900’s: she’s in domestic service, he’s a ploughman who craves advancement. He becomes a radical yet also joins an ancient brotherhood of horsemen – neither will work to his advantage.
Just as we’re getting involved in the tensions of their relationship, and its context of gender inequalities and dogmatic politics, we’re suddenly fast-forwarded into the present and another set of overly-complex circumstances. Turner and Wood are now Nan and Stanley, unsettled individuals who have fetched up in Izzy’s shabby bric-a-brac shop, ostensibly to help – Izzy (Bridget McCann) being fragile on many levels. The clue that connects and explains the time-shifts and the inter-related people is a large wooden chest which Izzy won’t open. By the time its secrets, and Izzy’s, are spilling out it’s hard to say whether it’s us or the production – directed by Matthew Lenton – that has lost the plot in among the pile-up of clutter.
Touring Scotland until September 20.
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