One Good Beating/My Child

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JOYCE MCMILLAN on ONE GOOD BEATING and MY CHILD at the Arches Theatre, Glasgow, for The Scotsman 6.5.11
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3 stars ***

THE QUOTE FROM PHILIP LARKIN’s This Be The Verse – printed on the cast-list – tells the whole story about this new short double-bill by the young Glasgow company Rekindle. The poem is the one about how parents hand on misery to their children; and both plays are about abuse within the family. First seen at the Traverse in 1998, Linda McLean’s One Good Beating is a brisk and brilliant half-hour drama about the relationship between two grown-up siblings – Elaine and Stephen – and their evil old father Robert, whom they’ve locked in the garden shed following the miserable funeral he has staged for their mother; and in Bill Wright’s fine and vivid production, Michelle Gallagher gives a memorable performance as Elaine, the woman who hates her father, but is so like him that no other relationship could ever compete, in intensity and meaning.

Mike Bartlett’s My Child, by contrast, is an angry mess of a drama about a father abandoned by his wife and child who thinks he is a good guy, but who nonetheless seeks to get access to his nine-year-old son by tying him up and keeping him prisoner. Every character in this play is repulsive, from the hero himself to his bitchy ex-wife, her sinister new partner, and even the child, a nasty little materialist who admires only wealth and volence. If there is an interesting play to be written about how cliches of successful masculinity clash with politically-correct morality, this heap of self-pitying misery isn’t it; and Wright and his company struggle to make any sense of it at all.

ENDS ENDS