Citizens’ Theatre, Glasgow, and touring 2006

Julie Austin as Anna and Barrie Hunter as Frank.

DOUGLAS MAXWELL’S latest comedy, ‘Melody’, is about a woman dealing with pangs of guilt after she snatched – and later returned – a baby from its real mother. It opened in Edinburgh the day before the Glasgow opening of Alistair Hewitt’s ‘Spending Frank’, a comedy about a woman dealing with pangs of guilt after she snatched – and later returned – a baby from its real mother.

With this evidence, we can only assume child-snatching is one of the pressing issues of the day, though in Hewitt’s lightweight and amiable comedy it doesn’t really seem so. The playwright is so busy getting laughs from the ups and downs of his heroine’s life that he underplays the seriousness of her big desire to have children.

It means her criminal act – an impulse grab from a pushchair in a coffee shop – seems eccentric as much as impassioned, trivialising the sensible discussion that could be had about women, fertility and body clocks.

In this respect, director Tony Cownie’s decision to cast Julie Austin in the lead role doesn’t add up. Hers is a loveable, lively, luminous performance – and the casting makes every sense in that respect – but she’s easily ten years too young to play the part of a woman who was dancing to Duran Duran in the early-80s and is now facing the prospect of never having children. Looking at her – slim, lithe and youthful – you can’t believe she’s facing any kind of sexual or maternal wilderness.

It makes it that much harder to sympathise with her motives and to feel the force of the play’s bigger point about the way women’s lives are so easily kicked about by high-pressure careers and manipulative men.

Pathos, then, is not a key quality in this Borderline production, but good humour is. As Anna, forever unlucky in love, Austin gives a confident and breezy performance opposite Angela Darcy and Barrie Hunter who double up as her various friends, lovers and arresting officers. It’s an inherently theatrical technique, unconcerned about fourth-wall realism, and makes for funny, feelgood performances.

You suspect, with his references to the dog-eat-dog property boom of the Thatcherite 80s and the touchy-feely self-help therapy of more recent times, that Hewitt believes the play to be more weighty than it actually is. In ambition or social commentary, ‘Spending Frank’ is no match for Caryl Churchill’s ‘Top Girls’. But if there’s nothing here that’ll tax you, it’s witty and entertaining all the same.

Spending Frank can be seen at the Spectrum Centre, Inverness (21 March); Fortrose Community Theatre (22 March), and Perth Theatre (18-22 April). Full tour details can be found on the Borderline website below.

© Mark Fisher, 2006

Link

• Borderline Thetare website