Showing @ Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh until Wed 24 Dec 2014 @ 19:30
A short delay on opening night of this new black comedy from Iain Finlay Macleod meant the audience could take in the realistic drawing-room set. Someone behind me says ‘it looks like every hotel in Pitlochry‘. This is the home of Cameron and Lara, two Edinburgh advocates celebrating Christmas Eve. Their calvados-fuelled idyll is disrupted by an intruder, John, who threatens harm to them, their dog and their valuables. Lara clearly has anger management issues and she overpowers the lumbering John and sets out to wreak revenge. She’s familiar with John’s verminous kind from her days in court. Trapping him in the dog’s cage she spits, ‘why can’t you behave like normal people?’
Depending on your outlook, this haute bourgeois world view is worthy of ridicule or mirrors your own woes about society’s decline. Either way it’s a soft target. How easy is it to knock over-paid lawyers with their paper-thin propriety off their pedestals? How might the play be received outside the Edinburgh bubble? It’s no Six Degrees of Separation, John Guare’s thrilling 1990s hit with which it bears many similarities. While Guare’s play tackles the nature of genuine versus fake, Macleod’s is broader and pawkier. Director Orla O’Laughlin keeps the action moving – the opening of the second half is a genuine shocker. But too often things veer towards One Foot in the Grave rather than the whiplash crackle of Joe Orton.
None of the characters is sympathetic. John Bett does Scottish posh well and Barbara Rafferty has a belter of a role, spitting poison like a wounded cobra. ‘The law is fine in theory!’ she says. This is no bitter satire on the very moral passing judgement on the very immoral, more a safe Christmas souffle for audiences to lap up.