The Dogstone, Nasty Brutish And Short, A Streetcar Named Desire, An Ideal Husband

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JOYCE MCMILLAN on THE DOGSTONE and NASTY, BRUTISH AND SHORT at the Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh, A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE at Perth Theatre, and AN IDEAL HUSBAND at the King’s Theatre, Edinburgh, for Scotsman Review, 14.11.08
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The Dogstone 3 stars ***
Nasty, Brutish And Short 3 stars ***
A Streetcar Named Desire 4 stars ****
An Ideal Husband 3 stars ***

WHEN THE GOOD TIMES ROLL, audiences sometimes seem to enjoy the shock of being forced to confront life at its ugliest; it’s not for nothing that Sarah Kane’s gruelling war story, Blasted, became one of the iconic western plays of the 1990’s boom years. In an economic depression, though, it’s time for a touch of magic and romance; which is perhaps why the latest double-bill in the Traverse/ National Theatre of Scotland Debuts season looks a little out of time, this autumn, while David Greig and Gordon McIntyre’s small-scale romantic comedy Midsummer, playing downstairs in the studio, seems to have caught the mood of the moment to perfection.

Brought together by Traverse director Dominic Hill in a diptych of misery and gathering gloom, Kenny Lindsay’s The Dogstone and Andy Duffy’s Nasty, Brutish And Short must be two of the most downbeat shows ever staged at the Traverse. In The Dogstone, a sixteen-year-old boy called Lorn watches his estranged Dad drink himself to death in Oban; the play is essentially a 75-minute monologue in the voice of the boy, interrupted by dialogue between him and his father. Lindsay tries hard to vary the pace and mood, suggesting the possible redemptive power – or destructive unreality – of the old legends of Scottish pre-history that Lorn’s Dad once used to tell him; and the play draws poignant performances from Scott Fletcher and Andy Gray. In the end, though, the sheer lack of dramatic action, or of any tension in a plot that is never heading anywhere but down, turns this into a leaden piece of theatre, weighed down even further by the dimly-lit squalor of Naomi Wlkinson’s minimal domestic set.

The Dogstone looks like an upbeat and purposeful piece of work, though, alongside Andy Duffy’s Nasty, Brutish and Short. Set by Wilkinson and Hill in some dystopian dump where the characters live with their feet in two inches of cold water, and everyone talks in a Taggart-style stereotype of a Glasgow accent, this is a nightmare hate-triangle of a play, in which a violent and bullying older brother, Jim, wades brutally into the fragile relationship between younger brother Luke – just out of mental hospital – and his new girlfriend Mary Jane, a helpless and childlike teenage mother.

The play has a certain primal power, particularly towards the end; and Ashley Smith gives a harrowing performance as the battered Mary Jane. In a culture saturated with sadistic porn, though, there’s something chillingly voyeuristic about the way this play forces the audience to watch the relentless bullying and eventual rape of Mary Jane; and something reactionary about the way it distances that violence from the audience by adopting such a familiar caricature of a working-class Glasgow voice. In the end, it’s hard to tell whether Duffy is asserting a bred-in-the-bone male brutalism that he sees as inevitable, or demanding change in a society which passes misery on from generation to generation. And in this case, the ambiguity is not so much interesting, as deeply depressing.

America’s great 20th century playwright-poet Tennesee Williams was no slouch himself when it came to acknowledging the ugliest aspects of life, including insanity, loneliness, rape, rejection, and the abuse of children. Yet Williams’s world is one in which – as in real life – misery always comes entwined with a contrasting sense of beauty, glamour, music and yearning; and Ian Grieve’s new Perth production of his 1947 masterpiece, A Streetcar Named Desire, offers an object lesson in how the tragedy and horror of the play is heightened, rather than masked, by giving full rein to its sensual richness.

Grieve sometimes indulges in sensory overload, in a production committed to using everything from overhead cameras to scratch-and-sniff technology to evoke the sights, smells and sounds of the New Orleans quarter where the play is set. But Trevor Coe’s set is beautiful, and Amanda Beveridge makes a poignant, spirited Blanche Dubois. And although this is not the most profound version of Streetcar you’ll ever see, it is memorably vivid, straightforward and heartfelt, to the end.

As a committed aesthete, Oscar Wilde was not interested in ugliness. Even his most evil-minded villains come gorgeously dressed; and it’s precisely because the sheer style and elegance of the life he portrays now lies far beyond our reach that Oscar Wilde’s medium – the dazzling, aristocratic drawing-room comedy – has come so completely to dominate his message about the corrupt underpinnings of polite society.

It’s therefore good to report that Sir Peter Hall’s much-admired touring production of An Ideal Husband manages to look like a gorgeous series of illustrations from a 1890’s fashion magazine, while not quite losing sight of its rather tense and entertaining story about a highly moralistic politician, Sir Robert Chiltern, who has founded his fortune on a spot of deft insider trading, and is now in danger of being exposed.

The production certainly seems creaky in places, and many of the actors are much too old for the parts they play. But Kate O’Mara and Carol Royle turn in a terrific, intelligent and well-tuned pair of performances as blackmailing wicked lady Mrs. Chevely, and her lovely and virtuous adversary, Gertrude Chiltern. And the overall message seems to be that everything changes, and nothing does; that the manners of the 21st century British boss class could hardly be more different from those portrayed here, but that the ups and downs of life in the Westminster village – the scandals, the reshuffles, and the roaring ambition – have barely changed at all.

The Dogstone and Nasty, Brutish And Short at the Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh, and An Ideal Husband at the King’s Theatre, Edinburgh, all until tomorrow, 15 November. A Streetcar Named Desire at Perth Theatre, until 22 November.

ENDS ENDS