Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh, and touring 2006

Patrick Hoffman (Dan) and Una McLean (Rose) in Gorgeous Avatar © Douglas Robertson

WOULDN’T IT be great to have a play that smashed through the fourth-wall realism of a conventional well-made drama and filled the stage with action movie heroes and singing cowboys? You’d think so, but in Jules Horne’s debut, in which an agoraphobic Borders copywriter awaits the arrival of her internet lover only to be shaken by her over-active imagination, the surreal interventions are more laboured than liberating.

Horne illustrates the way we always make wrong assumptions when trying to picture people we’ve never met. Even after an intense and revealing email exchange, we suspect we don’t know what a person is like until we’ve met them for real.

So when Amy sits at her computer daydreaming about the imminent arrival of Rafi, her American cyber-boyfriend – a man she’s known only as an avatar or 3D digital representation – she imagines him to be an overbearing US marine, a Clark Gable-style spiv and a musical cowboy in gingham. Each appears in turn as her nerves get the better of her.

You want to revel in the joyous exuberance of these sequences but, in Philip Howard’s production for the Traverse company, they’re never as funny as you’d expect. They seem more of a gimmick than a purposeful gag.

That’s partly because of the aimless quality of a first half that suffers from having too much talk and not enough to say. Horne has an attractive, lyrical turn to her writing, but she spends a lot of time getting to the point. In the storyline about Amy’s two neighbours forging a video diary about a house renovation, you even wonder if there is a point.

Presumably, Horne is attempting to draw a parallel between the illusion of Amy’s virtual romance and the faking of the film, but the subplot withers and dies before revealing any such connections.

The result is that the first act is a long preamble for the second, although it is sustained by excellent performances by Pauline Knowles, John Kazek, Una McLean and Patrick Hoffman. Only after the interval, when Rafi arrives for real, does Horne settle into the heart of the play.

What emerges is a delicate and tender exchange between two people who know each other intimately without ever having touched and, taken in isolation as a short and dreamy studio piece, it could have worked a treat.

Knowles and Kazek play off each other superbly, painstakingly marking out the physical territory that has hitherto been only virtual. There’s no need for surreal interruptions here: just a touching dilemma to be exposed.

Gorgeous Avatar can be seen at Ballachulish Village Hall (31 May); An Lanntair, Stornoway (2 June); Coigach Community Hall, Achiltibuie (5 June); Macphail Theatre, Ullapool (6 June); Strathpeffer Pavilion (8 June); Sabhal Mor Ostaig, Skye (10 June).

© Mark Fisher, 2006

Links:

• Traverse Theatre