Brunton Theatre, Musselburgh, and touring 2006

Robin Cameron, Crawford Logan, Bridget McCann, Janette Foggo

SIMON MENDES DA COSTA is a young playwright who has quickly found favour with audiences in London. ‘Losing Louis’, only his second play, transferred from Hampstead Theatre to the West End after a sell-out run.

A new production has just begun a three-month stint on Broadway. One critic called him “the kind of popular comic dramatist the West End has long been pining for”.

That’s just the kind of writer favoured by Borderline, the Ayrshire company which prides itself on its popular touch, but faces an uncertain future now the Scottish Arts Council has withdrawn its funding.

Sadly, there’s little in this leaden production that explains either the popularity of the play or the necessity of the company’s survival. There’s surely room in Scotland for a company specialising in mainstream entertainment – especially one based outwith the cities – but when such work falls flat, it pleases no one.

To be fair, some of the audience do gradually warm to this story about the adultery of one generation casting a shadow over the sanity of the next, but only after a mirthless first half that’s as rambling as it is old-fashioned.

It’s the day of the funeral of Louis Judah Ellis and his two middle-aged sons are back in the family home with their wives, all of them suppressing their animosity. Flashing back to the same suburban bedroom 50 years earlier, Da Costa reveals the roots of their mutual dislike: Louis was the secret biological father of both boys but to different mothers, and has passed on his guilt by favouring one son over the other.

What lets down Brian Pettifer’s production is its lack of attention to detail. Mostly this affects quite trivial moments, but they add up to create an unconvincing air.

A case in point: Janette Foggo, playing the wife of the eldest son, drops her lipstick, rather improbably, underneath the bed. When her husband refuses to retrieve it, she goes in search of it herself and complains she’s making a mess of her clothes. Yet we can see she plainly hasn’t made a mess of her clothes, hasn’t even spent long on the floor, and it makes an uncertain dramatic tangent seem even more spurious.

This is a very small detail but, like the family’s Jewishness, which they talk about but never demonstrate, it suggests the actors haven’t got under the skin of the play. If there are comic rhythms here, they haven’t tuned in to them, choosing to bark the lines into life until well into the play, when the twists of the plot give them some funnier material to work with.

A more subtle interpretation with more nuanced performances would have allowed us considerably more laughter as well as the full poignancy of the brothers’ final fall-out and reconciliation.

(Losing Louis can be seen at the Craigmonie Centre, Drumnadrochit, on 26 September, and Fortrose Community Theatre on 27 September).

© Mark Fisher, 2006

Links

• Borderline Theatre