Pitlochry Festival Theatre, in repertory until October 2007

Carol Ann Crawford and Jacqueline Dutoit.

IS ALAN AYCKBOURN’S ‘Snake in the Grass’ one of the most disturbing recent plays, or one of the silliest?

I fancy it’s both. On the one hand, it employs the playwright’s Trojan horse ability to weave dark themes into an innocuous middle-class drama. On the other, it plays so merrily with the conventions of the ghost story, complete with devilish last-minute twist, that it risks invalidating all the serious issues it raises.

First seen in 2002, the writer’s 61st play takes literally the idea of being visited by ghosts of the past. When Carol Ann Crawford’s Annabel Chester returns to claim the house she has inherited from her father, she is confronted by Lorna McDevitt’s Alice Moody, the old man’s nurse, who has a blackmail plot.

The young woman alleges that Annabel’s sister Miriam (Jacqueline Dutoit) hastened their father’s departure by pushing him down the stairs. Now Alice wants hush money.

Under pressure from the past and the present, the sisters reminisce about their experiences of wife-battering (Annabel) and sexual abuse (Miriam), while ghostly goings on in the electricity circuits and tennis courts suggest the past has not left them yet.

But no sooner have you been impressed by Ayckbourn’s preparedness to bring a popular audience into such uncomfortable territory than the plot doubles back on itself to reveal, after a second murder attempt, that nothing is as it seems.

Without giving too much away, I can say the final twist works in the teasing context of a ghost story where there is pleasure in uncertainty, but at the same time calling into question the psychological truth the playwright has so carefully established.

We’re left in a dilemma: do we go along with the unfeasible ghost story just for the fun of it or do we sympathise with the women and their histories of sexual violence? It’s hard to do both.

It makes you wonder if Ayckbourn has something serious to say about abusive behaviour or if he is just using it as another dramatic trick. By treating such sensitive material in so cavalier a manner, ‘Snake in the Grass’ comes perilously close to exploitation.

These are the unresolved questions you leave the theatre with. Until that point, the production, directed by John Durnin on an ultra-realistic set by Adrian Rees, is acted with wit and pace and does that rare thing, make an audience jump with fright. It makes for an enjoyable evening with a bitter twist.

© Mark Fisher, 2007

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• Pitlochry Festival Theatre
• Mark Fisher’s Scottish Theatre Blog