BEFORE THE PARTY

Pitlochry Festival Theatre

Various dates until October 11

QUALITY STREET

Pitlochry Festival Theatre

Various dates until October 12

Reviewed by Mark Brown

Rodney Ackland’s 1949 play Before The Party (which is based upon W. Somerset Maugham’s 1922 novella of the same name) is a curious beast. The latest work to open in the Pitlochry Festival Theatre (PFT) six-show summer season, the piece (which Ackland relocates from the early-Twenties to 1949) tells the story of the sudden, existential crisis of the wealthy Skinner family. As such, it might be considered in the same thematic ballpark as other dramas of imploding bourgeois families, such as Aleksandr Ostrovsky’s classic 1859 play The Storm or Thomas Vinterberg’s 1998 film Festen.

However, Ackland’s work has neither Ostrovsky’s brooding, premonitory atmosphere nor the Dogme-style jaggedness of Vinterberg’s movie. Instead, it presents Maugham’s satire in the style of a straight-batting, English drawing room comedy, akin to the works of Terence Rattigan and Noel Coward.

The drama takes place in the capacious bedroom of Laura Skinner, recently widowed daughter of successful lawyer (and prospective Tory by-election candidate) Aubrey Skinner and his wife Blanche. Other members of the household (Nanny, the housekeeper, grown-up sister Kathleen and precocious younger sister Susan, who is still at school) flit in and out.

Posh, but seemingly ineligible, David Marshall is also in the house. Laura is secretly engaged to be married to him, just eight months after the death of her husband Harold, a colonial official in West Africa. However, the unexpected nuptials are small beer compared with the other bombshell that is about to be dropped in this well-heeled household.

There is in all this a fantastic disconnect between the breeziness of English theatrical naturalism and the bleakness of the subject matter (which ranges from terrible violence to the Skinner family’s many, appalling bigotries). However, director Gemma Fairlie’s production seems to lack the necessary self-confidence.

Despite boasting a strong cast (Kirsty McDuff plays Laura with glamour and steely determination, Mark Elstob’s Aubrey is appropriately upright and hypocritical), this staging seems stilted and under-rehearsed. During Tuesday night’s press performance there were numerous moments in which actors jumped their cues or stumbled on a line.

There’s a difficulty, too, with Amanda Stoodley’s set design. The transparency of the wallpaper in Laura’s room might allow us to see that young Susan is, once again, listening in on adult conversations, but, in general, the device is a damaging distraction.

The choice to allow us to see actors walking across the back of the stage before they enter a scene is a poor one. The use of actors seen through the wall to represent characters who are supposed to be outside, being viewed through Laura’s bedroom window, is little better. The transparent wall might have seemed like a piece of audaciously innovative design, but, in practice, it backfires.

Despite such weaknesses, the play’s satire on what Luis Bunuel sarcastically called “the discreet charm of the bourgeoisie” still shines through. The blithe, yet vicious, racism (towards both Africans and the family’s Jewish servant) within the Skinner household is truly sinister and chilling, and is all the more so for being wrapped up in the trappings of the genteel drawing room comedy.

There is a very different kind of comedy of manners in PFT’s staging of J.M. Barrie’s 1901 play Quality Street. Although it was so popular in its day that it gave its title to a popular brand of chocolates, the drama has been performed rarely in Scotland in modern times; according to the Scottish Theatre Archive there hasn’t been a professional production of the piece since 1953.

Set on the titular thoroughfare in a small, English garrison town in 1805 and, in the immediate aftermath of the Battle of Waterloo, in 1815, director Liz Carruthers’s staging tackles the play with a 21st-century irony. Designer Adrian Rees’s costumes are a work of Regency naturalism, but his sets, which are dominated by chocolate box paintings, add to the production’s sense of knowing detachedness.

This four-act play, which traces the fortunes of the respectable, middle-class Throssel sisters, Phoebe (Fiona Wood) and Susan (Camrie Palmer), has the air of a decorous period piece, but it has a biting, satirical edge in the second half. Living, in 1805, in a society of suffocating gossip and rigid gender roles, Phoebe (who is widely admired and considered eminently marriageable) has her heart broken by local gentleman Valentine Brown (Alan Mirren).

When Valentine arrives for a much-anticipated visit, he announces, not that he wants to marry Phoebe, but that he has enlisted in the army, and will be leaving soon to fight Napoleon. Returning a decade later, he is entirely unaware both of Phoebe’s emotional anguish and the fact that his terrible financial advice all but bankrupted the sisters (who consequently had to turn their home into a “school for genteel children”).

The returned soldier compounds his offence when, with a notable lack of chivalry, he remarks on how tired and old Phoebe seems. This prompts Phoebe to reinvent herself as “Miss Livvy” (who is, supposedly, her own niece), the belle of the army ball to celebrate victory in the war.

The ensuing, gentle farce, in which “Miss Livvy” fools the hapless Valentine completely, turns the gender tables in a decidedly modern fashion. Wood leads a fine cast with tremendous comic energy, while Mirren plays Valentine with the skill you would expect of a man from Paisley who shares his surname with both his town’s patron saint and its Scottish Championship winning football team.