Educating Agnes, Six Black Candles, The Dacha

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JOYCE MCMILLAN on EDUCATING AGNES at the Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh, SIX BLACK CANDLES at Cottiers Theatre, Glasgow, and THE DACHA at Oran Mor, Glasgow, for Scotsman Arts, 14.4.11
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Educating Agnes 4 stars ****
Six Black Candles 3 stars ***
The Dacha 3 stars ***

IT”S A FEATURE of great classic plays that they never stand still; they have their periods of obscurity, and then suddenly flare into life again, full of energy and meaning. For decades, Moliere’s 1662 masterpiece The School For Wives has looked like a brilliantly-made stock comedy, full of classic stereotypes of ageing buffoons and sweet young things.

Suddenly, though, the new internet age of sexual fantasy has given a sharp contemporary twist to its theme of sexual grooming, and the apparently perennial desire of some men for a partner who is both implausibly young, and completely compliant. Today, online fortunes are being made every day from the impulse that Moliere dramatised so sharply three and a half centuries ago. And if there is one writer who might have been born to spot these connections, and to transform them into a stream of fiercely witty and thought-provoking dramatic verse, it’s Scotland’s Makar Liz Lochhead, whose brilliant 2008 version of School For Wives has now been given a fine second production at the Royal Lyceum, as the final play in a memorable spring season of shows with a strong female twist.

Moliere’s play tells the story of a middle-aged man, Arnolphe, who wants an innocent young wife who will not make a cuckold or a fool of him. His plan, therefore, is to marry his 17-year-old ward Agnes, an orphan he has adopted as a baby, and educated in a nunnery, far from the wicked world. Agnes, though has other ideas. She has spotted and fallen in love with a handsome young chap called Horace; and Moliere’s comedy is shaped around the cheerful story of how Arnolphe’s exploitative impulses are foiled by a combination of young love,and benign coincidence.

What’s striking about Lochhead’s Scots-accented version is the energy and invention with which it updates the language of this story, while leaving it in a roughly 17th-century setting. Tony Cownie’s production, with design by Hayden Griffin, boasts the kind of witty old-Edinburgh set that delights audiences, while demolishing Arnolphe’s sexual attitudes in language that brings to bear the whole wisdom – both male and female – of the gender wars of the last forty years.

The anachronism is more superficial than real, though, since the mood of the language precisely matches the tone and meaning of Moliere’s text. And it’s a measure of the quality of Tony Cownie’s brilliantly-cast production – and of a superb central performance from Peter Forbes, until now best known for creating the great role of the officer in Black Watch – that it both honours the basic shape of this classic comedy, and recognises the complexity of the characters involved. It recognises Agnes not just as an ingenue, but as a formidable woman in the making. And at the deepest level, it acknowledges that Arnolphe is not just a lascivious old fool, but – like all of us, eventually – a lover grown too old to attract the one he desires; and also a father of sorts, uttering that primal roar of rage that the lovely girl on whom he has lavished so much care and treasure will finally belong not to him, but to another man entirely.

Des Dillon’s Six Black Candles – first seen at the Lyceum in 2004 – is another show with a strong distaff twist, featuring a cast of eight women and one man, and a fierce female perspective on exactly how a woman should react, when her husband runs off with the teenage babysitter. Set somewhere in Catholic Lanarkshire, in the kind of extreme and surreal post-working-class environment reflected in television shows like Shameless, Six Black Candles tells the story of a rough evening at the flat of distraught Caroline, who has summoned her five sisters, her mother and her old gran – dotty, but not daft – to perform a piece of serious black magic on the waxen head of her hated love-rival, young Stacie Gracie.

Dillon’s text is full of hilarious one-liners and bold black comedy, and John Binnie’s production – for Dillon’s new touring company Goldfish Theatre – assembles a stellar cast, including Kay Gallie, Beth Marshall, Wendy Seager and Carmen Pieraccini. For the moment, though, the cast seem slightly out of rhythm with the play, rushing at the text rather than relaxing into the language; and it seems likely that this will mature into a richer and funnier production, as it tours around Scotland, over the next five weeks.

The two women who appear in Helen Kluger’s The Dacha – this week’s Play, Pie and Pint show at Oran Mor – have probably never heard of feminism, and would despise it if they had; but still, their story offers a memorable female perspective on life in the lower depths of post-Soviet Russia. Madam Irina is an old and ailing former dance teacher with the great ballet companies of Soviet Russia; her housekeeper Louba is an urban peasant, unable to read or write, but well up to most of the tricks necessary to keep the small, shabby household ticking over, in an age of rising prices, and tiny or non-existent state pensions.

Their relationship – a constant sparring-match sustained by unspoken mutual affection and dependence – is a familiar dramatic cliche, more literary than theatrical. It uses this familiar set-up, though, to expose new strands of pain and loss in Russian life, as Louba faces the terrible fate of a soldier son serving in Chechnya, and Madam Irina is reduced to selling her Order of Lenin medal to pay the rent. And Philip Howard’s production boasts two stunning performances from Colette O’Neil as Madam and Anne Lacey as Louba; so deep, poetic, and beautifully-pitched that they sometimes come close to transforming this predictable play into a real masterpiece.

Educating Agnes at the Royal Lyceum, Edinburgh, until 7 May. Six Black Candles at Cottiers Theatre, Glasgow, until tonight, and on tour across Scotland until 22 May, including dates in Inverness, Perth, Dundee, and Stirling. The Dacha at Oran Mor, Glasgow, until Saturday.

ENDS ENDS