Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh, 5 October 2007, and touring

L to R: Julie Heatherill, Itxaso Moreno and Claire Cunningham (photo - Eamon McGoldrick).

IT TAKES a good story to turn a good idea into a good play. That’s why Kathy McKean’s ‘Beneath You’ never gets going. Her promising theme about the pressure on young women to share in the consumerist dream is merely that – a theme – and one that lacks a decent tale to make it dramatic.

Throw in a set of performances of variable standard in Morvern Gregor’s production for Birds of Paradise and you have a show that ranges from the hesitant to the amateurish, only partially redeemed by the intriguing use of choreographic movement.

The play is inspired by the true-life case of a group of teenage girls in Chile who would break into up-market apartments by scaling the outside of buildings. They would pilfer cash and leave by the front door, spending the proceeds not on drink, drugs and fast cars, like the robbers of old, but on designer clothes.

It’s not hard to make the connection between the bombardment of glamorous magazine images and the desire of the young women to compete in the race to be most fashionable. And it’s not hard to wonder how much of a threat the girls are once they have been brought into the criminal justice system supposedly for society’s protection.

Set wealthy crime victim against impoverished fashion victim and, in terms of the obscene extremes of capitalism, there’s little to choose between them.

So McKean’s play, which transposes the story to Scotland, could have been a howl of rage against the unfairness of poverty, against the commercial pressures focused on young women or against the vagaries of the criminal justice system.

But it isn’t really any of these things, just an uninspiring story in which girls go climbing, girls escape detection, girls get caught and girls get sentenced. We’re not called upon to care for them – beyond being mildly impressed by the way they balance on the walls of Claire Halleran’s angular set – nor to be fussed when the law gets the upper hand.

There is some minor friction between the three girls as they challenge each other’s place in the pecking order, an unconvincing exchange with a private detective and a plea for reason by a lawyer, but none of it is enough to animate the ideas that inspired the play.

The company’s aim to give a voice to those whose stories are rarely told is laudable, but from this production it’s not at all clear what those voices are saying.

© Mark Fisher, 2007

Links

• Birds of Paradise Theatre Company
• Dràma Na h-Alba
• Mark Fisher’s Scottish Theatre Blog