Pitlochry Festival Theatre, in repertory until October 2007

Rory Murray as Mike Connor, Beth Nestor as Tracy Lord and Lorna McDevitt as Liz Imbrie (photo - Douglas McBride).

THE PHILADEPHIA STORY is the play that was made into the film with Katherine Hepburn, Cary Grant and James Stewart before being transformed into High Society, the Cole Porter musical.

On one level it’s a story of an upper-class American family who risk being humiliated on the daughter’s wedding day by a magazine story about an adulterous affair between the father and a chorus girl, a scandalous prospect staved off only by a counter plot to blackmail the publisher.

On an archetypal level, it’s the story of the haughty Tracy Lord who, on the eve of her marriage to the buttoned-up George Kittredge, finds herself pulled between her hard-hearted father, a magazine writer whom she regards as her social inferior and her first husband, Dexter Haven.

During a midsummer’s night of bacchanalian excess, she learns to face up to her own vulnerability and to head in the direction that her heart most truly desires. Surrounded by men who offer different but imbalanced aspects of the masculine ideal – the authoritarian father, the combative writer, the humourless fiancé – she finds herself drawn to the one whose charm, playfulness and authority hold the best prospect of letting her flourish into a whole human being herself. That man, ironically enough, turns out to be Dexter, the perfect match she never realised she already had.

It’s a story that keeps an audience held with the irresistible narrative force of a fairytale, but John Durnin’s production, looking suitably elegant in the glacial greys of Monika Nisbet’s set, underplays the tension by making too little distinction between the competing male figures.

Greg Powrie as Kittredge is a little pompous, but not enough of a humourless prig to make you fear an emotionally barren future for the couple. Rory Murray as magazine man Mile Connor has a rough-edged charm, but it only seems to be the excess of alcohol that makes him a contender for Lord’s affections.

And, crucially, there is nothing in Gavin Kean’s Dexter to make him so obviously the right man for her. We should be rooting for him all the way, observing how the sparks fly between him and Elizabeth Nestor’s bride-to-be, but there is no such chemistry – or at least, no more than there is between Nestor and any of the male leads. None of this is down to poor acting – all of them acquit themselves well – but the overall interpretation lacks clarity. The result is a conclusion that is as haphazard as it is satisfying.

© Mark Fisher, 2007

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