Tron Theatre, Glasgow, 15 June 2007, and touring

Cyprus (photo - Douglas Robertson).

JUST WHEN you thought the stage thriller was dead, here comes playwright Peter Arnott and Mull Theatre to prove if not that it has a robust future, at least that it has yet to breath its last.

Here, just as Agatha Christie would have recognised it, we have a remote country house, many a glass of whisky and even a handgun to up the tension for the denouement. There are so many secrets, lies and twists upon twists that to give an accurate run-down of the plot would require the double-dealing skill of an MI5 agent.

But, tired though these conventions are, Arnott sees them as an appropriate Trojan horse to carry his analysis of a world order corrupted by the power games of the establishment. The roots of today’s global unrest, he implicitly suggests, snake their way back to a time when country-house thrillers were all the rage.

In this genteel sitting room of a mansion near Dervaig on the Isle of Mull, the playwright releases forces that connect 9/11, Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran and al-Qaida. The result is a dense, wordy drama, directed by Arnott himself, that works despite itself.

Unlike the form it adopts, its politics are radical; unlike much radical theatre, it is not above portraying the human costs of the politics it describes. Woven into his vision of the realpolitik of spooks and Whitehall apparatchiks is a sad domestic tragedy about the personal damage caused by a life keeping state secrets and selling your principles to the highest bidder.

Arnott’s theme is – to use the language of the security services – to do with blowback, the phenomenon of western-funded insurgents biting the hand that fed them when circumstances change.

Kern Falconer’s Brian Traquair and Mark McDonnell’s Mike Griffen are former British agents with a history of interference in the Middle East. When they show up unexpectedly in Traquair’s house, where his 36-year-old daughter, Alison (Mary Wells) also happens to be, their tangled history of meddling with uncontrollable political forces slowly comes to light.

The deceit and double deceit make it impossible to work out who the good guys are – the playwright’s point presumably being that there can be no good guys in such a corrupt, callous and mercenary system.

The script could do with pruning, but it’s gripping, relevant stuff. Any melodramatic tendencies are countered by three finely understated performances, giving an old-fashioned drama the fearful flavour of today’s world in crisis.

(Cyprus’s remaing dates include Glen Urquart Hall, Drumnadrochit, 19 June; Plockton Hall, 20 June: Aultbea Hall, 21 June; Lochinver Hall, 22 June; Lyth Arts Centre, 23 June; Strathpeffer Pavilion, 26 June; Birnam Arts Centre, 27 June).

© Mark Fisher, 2007

Links

• Mull Theatre