PEER GYNT, MOLLY SWEENEY, A SHEEP CALLED SKYE

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JOYCE McMILLAN on PEER GYNT  at Dundee Rep, and MOLLY SWEENEY and A SHEEP CALLED SKYE (NTS On Tour at Bladnoch Distillery, Wigtown), for Scotsman Critique, 5.10.07
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Peer Gynt  5 stars *****
Molly Sweeney   4 stars ****
A Sheep Called Skye    3 stars ***

IT’S IN THE STREET outside Dundee Rep, five minutes before the start of the show, that I begin to suspect we’re about to see something special.  One of those vast, white party limousines is nosing through the Tay Street traffic, adding to the general crush.  Then suddenly it swerves into the theatre forecourt, pulls up at the door, and spills out a screaming, singing, fighting car-load of drop-dead-vulgar wedding-guests, who swarm into the theatre and up to the bar, where they begin to karaoke the punters to death with a series of  ear-splitting country-and-western torch-songs.

This is Dominic Hill’s Peer Gynt, his final production at Dundee Rep as he leaves to become artistic director of the Traverse, and the Rep’s first major co-production with the National Theatre of Scotland; and it’s a show to shout about from the rooftops, not only the finest piece of classic theatre Scotland has produced in half a decade, but also a final, dazzling counterblast to the idea this mighty epic – written in 1867, when Ibsen was not yet 40 – is somehow unstageable.  The secret of Hill’s success is twofold.  First, there’s the sheer, practised richness of his long-term relationship with the Rep’s permanent ensemble of actors, which gives this show the depth and sheen of a production that has been in preparation for years, rather than weeks.

Then secondly there is his understated but absolute assumption that Ibsen’s great, archetypal story about the male quest for freedom and fame, and about Peer’s ambiguous relationship with the ties of true love that would bind him, is not some archaic Norwegian folk-tale, but a hilarious, beautiful and hard-hitting story for our own age, crazed as it is by the same dream of perfect individual freedom that drives Peer’s quest.  Colin Teevan’s new version of the text is superb, as fresh, frank, hard-edged and occasionally obscene as if he had just picked up the story on the streets of Glasgow or Manchester.  Naomi Wilkinson’s inspired design clears the stage back to its walls and gantries to allow full play to the imagination, deftly evoking Peer Gynt’s rural background with a cigarette-advert-style image on a city hoarding, that can turn on a sixpence to conjure up ordinary walls and houses.

And in this magical space, an augmented, 18-strong Dundee company – led by a wonderful Keith Fleming as the young Peer, and an equally fine Gerry Mulgrew as the older one – give a series of brilliant, funny, inspired, and completely purposeful performances, moving without missing a beat from the simple escape-narrative of the first half to the difficult, episodic satire on earthly wealth and power that dominates the second.   And what they show us is Ibsen’s masterpiece reborn as a piece of world-class popular theatre for our time; not only hilarious, earthy and true, but also as full of beauty, poetry, and sorrow as Ibsen could have hoped, when he first brought together folk-tale and epic to tell this magnificent story of a man’s struggle to be fully himself, and finally to accept the paradox that in failing to give himself to others, he has lost his own best chance of fulfilment.

If Peer Gynt is a breathtaking example of what Scotland’s National Theatre can achieve in co-production with one of our finest companies, then the slightly subdued double-bill of touring shows launched by the NTS at last weekend’s Booktown Festival in Wigtown is perhaps a gentle warning that the national company has less to offer when it goes it alone.  Gregory Thompson’s 2005 Citizens’ production of Molly Sweeney – now revived by the NTS for a 22-date three-month tour of Scotland – remains a beautiful and haunting production, the story of a beautiful, sightless woman in small-town Donegal wrenched out of her familiar world by the driving energy of two men – her boyishly enthusiastic husband, and her burned-out husk of a once-brilliant opthalmologist – who are themselves classic Peer Gynt figures.

Gregory Thompson’s production – which wrenches the play from monologue distance to a powerful, convivial involvement with the audience – is as well-conceived as ever, and Cara Kelly’s award-winning performance as Molly is beautiful, richly sensual, worth the ticket price in itself.  But despite strong support from Michael Glenn Murphy, revisiting his role as her husband Frank, the re-cast production has lost some of the high triangular tension that made it one of the finest shows of  2005; and last Saturday’s audience, in the pretty studio space at Bladnoch Distillery, deserved a more intense and pacey experience than they actually received.

As for A Sheep Called Skye, a children’s show for under-7’s touring alongside Molly Sweeney – well, to say that it is not up to the standard currently being achieved by world-class Scottish children’s companies like Catherine Wheels and Wee Stories is to put things politely.  Based on S.R. Harris’s coy little story about a sheep with an identity crisis, Nicola McCartney’s 70-minute stage version is a weakly-written affair that takes ages to get into the narrative, and fails to impress even once it gets moving.

The show has a couple of assets that just nudge it into the three-star category, in the shape of a pretty, grassy set by Becky Minto, and a most beguiling sheep-puppet, which plays Skye most of the time.  But the moments when the puppet is replaced by puppet-maker Ailie Cohen herself, in a thoroughly uncomfortable performance as Skye’s human half, are awkward at best; and left me wondering why on earth the NTS chose to create this show alone, rather than in collaboration with a more experienced chldren’s company that might have helped – as it were – to make a nice woolly jumper out of this limp sheep’s ear of a show.

Peer Gynt at Dundee Rep until 13 October; Molly Sweeney and A Sheep Called Skye at Kilwinning this weekend, and on tour until final dates at the Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh, 12-15 December.

ENDS ENDS ENDS

~ by joycemcmillan on October 5, 2007.