Pitlochry Festival Theatre, in repertory until October 2007

Callum O'Neill, Steven Rae and Joanne Cummins (photo - Douglas McBride).

IN A COUNTRY that has so recently voted in a nationalist government, you’d expect there to be a unified sense of what it means to be Scottish. But if Scotland has any distinctive quality it is surely not so much its coherence as its cultural diversity.

It is a land of Highland tele-cottagers, Central Belt financiers, Polish hotel workers and island oil workers. Even the tourists must see through the clichés of bagpiping kilt-wearers and shortbread-making crofters.

This is the point so cleverly made in Stephen Greenhorn’s ten-year-old comedy, a self-styled “road movie for the stage” in which two lads from Motherwell venture north in a stolen Lada and discover their own country is a good deal stranger than they ever imagined.

Far from being a homogenous landscape of traditional culture, the Scotland they find, as they wind their way from Loch Lomond to Skye and onwards to Thurso, is a place of Canadian beatniks, Australian surfers and Ukrainian fishermen. The crofters do electronic deals with Silicon Valley and the only man in a kilt is from France.

Does it add up to an identity crisis? Not for the ceilidh dancers who are happier listening to Johnny Cash than Gaelic song. And not for the English army drop-out who’s taken to poaching rabbits and living off the land.

But for Alex and Brian, winningly played by Callum O’Neill and Steven Rae in Ken Alexander’s feel-good production, the journey through this colourful cultural patchwork is a challenge to their very sense of themselves.

The implicit joke of the plot is that Scotland is too small for a road movie – and a clapped-out Lada is hardly the stuff of Thelma and Louise. Yet for the Motherwell boys it presents a landscape of mind-expanding magnitude.

The shock to the system sends one into morose introspection, the other into suicidal despair, but by the end of the journey, they are changed men. Brian is ready to put his library-learned store of trivial knowledge to some practical use. Alex is set to cast aside his Scottish working-class male inhibitions, connect with his emotions and pronounce the word “beautiful”.

All of this is worn lightly in Greenhorn’s very funny script and played wittily on Charles Cusick Smith’s set that opens out from a claustrophobic grey wall of Central Belt concrete to a broad expanse of grey Highland mountains.

Backed by an entertaining sequence of multi-character supporting roles from Carol Ann Crawford and Greg Powrie – plus an uncharacteristically frightening baddy from Martyn James – the play is showing some early signs of dating (these days Ladas are quite good and Scotland is more full of Poles than Ukrainians) but generally holds its own as a bright, breezy and purposeful comedy for our times.

© Mark Fisher, 2007

Links

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