Sins Of The Father

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JOYCE MCMILLAN on SINS OF THE FATHER at Coldingham Village Hall for The Scotsman 11.10.11
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3 stars ***

THE WIND HOWLS, and the house is as cold and bleak as any dank, neglected cottage on a remote Scottish hillside. If a man has been living here, he has been allowing himself few comforts; and it’s into this chill space that Emma James steps, at the beginning of Tom Murray’s intense 70-minute play for the Borders touring company Rowan Tree. A bitter young woman visibly shaking with anger, she waits for the man who lives here; and it turns out, after a few minutes of conversation almost strangled by her rage and his fear, that he is the son of the man who, 20 years ago, viciously murdered her mother in this same glen, leaving Emma’s life blighted by loss.

It’s a brilliant situation that Tom Murray sets up in this new Rowan Tree play, full of possibilities for debate around issues of crime, punishment, sin and redemption. A generation ago, most people would have considered it obvious that Robert Preston Junior – superbly played here by Jordan Young, opposite Lesley Hart’s equally fine Emma – carries no responsibility for his father’s crime, committed when he was only 8; but in our new, age of genetic determinism, both he and Emma seem seized by the conviction that any ordinary anger he feels, or violent impulse he experiences, signals that he, too, is a killer at heart.

In the end, Murray doesn’t quite succeed in developing the full dramatic potential of his story; the mood – enhanced by the howling wind of John Carnegie’s production – is too relentlessly miserable to allow for any glimmer of hope, the end too grimly sensational. The play stands, though, as a useful warning about the death-dealing horror of any creed that allows for no redemption, and no change; and offers an unusually intense theatrical experience to audiences in Biggar, Carlops, Coldstream and Yetholm, as it tours on this week.

ENDS ENDS