Pitlochry Festival Theatre, in repertory until October 2007

Grant O'Rourke and Crawford Logan.

GETTING STUCK in traffic en route to the theatre, I arrived 15 minutes into the first act of Robert McLellan’s 1948 comedy about life in Scotland circa 1760, when the nation was still acclimatising to the union of the crowns. For my absence I would normally apologise, yet so easily did I slip into Richard Baron’s period production that the loss seemed entirely mine.

It took no introduction to see Grant O’Rourke was giving a superb performance as the posturing Charles Gilchrist, newly educated in London and saddled with a hilariously preposterous English accent as he tried to better himself among his Edinburgh peers.

From politics (“pole-atics”) to Inverary (untranscribable), his pronunciation was priceless. Rubbing everyone up the wrong way, including his father and would-be girlfriend, Gilchrist is that archetypal figure of fun, a man without self-knowledge, and O’Rouke embodied him in deliriously deadpan style.

What was odd was finding the second act, which I saw in its entirety, as baffling as if I’d spent half the time on the A9. This, it seems, is for two reasons. First, that McLellan launches into an unnecessarily convoluted plot involving a rival to Gilchrist’s bid for Westminster in the form of a newly returned Scots-Indian nabob who, in a mirthless twist, insists on keeping the temperature at a subcontinental high.

The second reason is that this act is when Baron fields those members of the Pitlochry ensemble who are least comfortable with the Scots language – and least comprehensible with it.

You’d blame the archaic vocabulary for your befuddlement if it hadn’t been for Carol Ann Crawford making the language sing in the first act.

As Girzie Carmichael, the rightful heir to the Craigengelt estate, which has been confiscated because of the family’s support of Bonnie Prince Charlie, Crawford is on top form, as confident and clear as any actor should be in a play about the legitimacy of the Scots language.

Martyn James as her cheeky servant and Suzanne Donaldson as Gilchrist’s love interest have a similar facility with the text.

Fortunately, it’s a play of three acts and, after their absence from the second, Crawford, James and Donaldson return to delight us once more in a play that is more successful as a comedy of manners than a drama of political intrigue.

© Mark Fisher, 2007

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• Mark Fisher’s Scottish Theatre Blog