Showing @ Tron Theatre, Glasgow until Sat 29 Oct

It’s still sometimes alarming how much of a stranglehold the alcohol industry has on us, as in a recent poll, young people have claimed for more protection against advertising. As Theatre Jezebel brings Owen McCafferty’s 2005 version of JP Miller’s screenplay, here designed and directed by Kenny Miller, the nature of alcoholism is unmercifully questioned – and how its appeal can lure the very life out of our society.

Wide-eyed couple Donal and Mona (Keith Fleming and Sally Reid) fall in love after a chance meeting on their way to London from Belfast. Drifting through an eight year period from 1962 to 1970, the pair take to drinking and soon become lost in the uncompromising world of alcoholism which so readily assumed the frightening underside of consequence to the 60s counterculture movement.

Stage curtains are swept from side to side to reveal the shattered reality of the alcoholic. As the years go by, the clinking of whiskey glasses and toasts to the future ironise a bleak life the couple have set themselves up for; in their quest for ‘the next drink’, Kenny Miller clashes the glitzy appeal of 60s London with the claustrophobic walls of the couple’s flat. On the surface, the remorseless qualities of drink are harshly probed by Miller and McCafferty, but the underlying strength held by the play’s protagonists isn’t truly revealed, and misses the commanding presence brought about by Jack Lemmon and Lee Remick in Blake Edwards’ 1962 adaptation. A sense of control which is always alluded to and yearned for throughout the play seems glossed over without enough reflection, in favour of swiftly polarising the action between high-flying success and lingering hangovers. So while Miller’s version is successful in its devastating honesty, it somewhat lacks in depth and finesse, a development which would guarantee the play’s masterful examination of social and self destruction at the hands of alcohol.