MARK FISHER finds Suspect Culture’s latest production takes a fresh and funny look at perennial themes.

IF EVERY lonely heart was as true as their word, you wouldn’t be able to move in the countryside for all the hill-walkers. It’d be standing-room only in every cinema and they’d be queuing round the block for the theatre. The stuff we write in the small ads is less the truth about ourselves than a projection of the people we’d like to be – keen hill-walkers and enthusiastic arts lovers, a little bit younger, slimmer and more sexy than we actually are.

Thus it is, in Renato Gabrielli’s comedy for Suspect Culture, that two strangers present themselves to the world via an international dating agency with its strange combination of intimacy and anonymity. One of them is British, a perennially insecure Selina Boyack, the other Italian, a self-deluding Sergio Romano. From one end of Europe to the other, they are gradually drawn towards each other.

Their exaggerations, distortions and lies are further complicated by the language barrier. One of the play’s jokes is that it is performed in English and Italian and should be comprehensible to speakers of either. In this, the audience becomes complicit in Gabrielli’s theme about communication. The play suggests that even in an internet age, where we’ll all just a text message away from each other, the opportunities for confusion and misrepresentation are vast.

In Graham Eatough’s good-looking production, this is expressed very entertainingly. Boyack and Romano never actually meet (except in the guise of other characters) and, on Luigi Gabrielli’s fabulous big-dipper of a set, they literally circle around each other at various heights and angles in an age-old courtship dance. It feels funny and fresh, not least because of a couple of unexpected turns in Gabrielli’s script.

For these reasons, the show is well worth seeing even though it gives the illusion of having more to say than it actually does. It’s only 90 minutes long, but you get the basic idea a while before the end and, if your attention drifts, there are no major plot twists to pull you back. The clever set and Kenny MacLeod’s imposing music help create an impression of something radical, but deep down, A Different Language is an old-fashioned romantic comedy that doesn’t quite deliver on its initial promise.

A Different Language can be seen at:
The Lemon Tree, Aberdeen, Tuesday 22 March 2005
Mill Theatre, Thurso, Thursday 24 March 2005
Birnam Institute, Dunkeld, Saturday 26 March 2005

© Mark Fisher, 2005

Related Links:

• Suspect Culture website