Tron Theatre, Glasgow, 22 April 2008, and touring

The Wasp Factory - Nicola Jo Cully and Robbie Jack. (Linda Graham)

THERE’S LITTLE source of comfort in Iain Banks’s remarkable debut novel from 1984. It’s bad enough that the first-person narrator is Frank, a teenage loner who spends his days on an unnamed island near Inverness inflicting gratuitous violence on rabbits and other animals.

That’s when he’s not turning his murderous instincts on other children. But there’s no solace either in the boy’s father, an odd mixture of post-hippy politics and sadistic neglect, still less in the boy’s older brother Eric who’s on the run from a mental hospital with an even greater taste for destruction.

It’s the gothic overkill of it all that helped The Wasp Factory on its way to cult status. The shocks and surprises are compelling in their awfulness, something younger readers in particular have lapped up. The moral standpoint of the novel is not entirely nihilistic, however. Banks presents the wanton violence and the emotional emptiness as a consequence of an all-male world. Frank’s mother is long out of the picture and the only other regular female presence in his life is the elderly Saturday help.

The novel’s biggest twist – that Frank is actually a girl – is saved until the end. Only then do we realise the extent of the father’s emotional repression and the terrible cost of social conditioning.

This is why director Ed Robson’s decision to cast a woman in the central role in this co-production from the Tron Theatre and Cumbernauld Theatre (in the adaptation by Malcolm Sutherland first seen at Glasgow’s Citizens’ Theatre) not only lessens one of the book’s biggest surprises, it also undermines the author’s vision. We can see Nicola Jo Cully’s Frank is a woman from the start, so despite all her tom-boy cheekiness, we can never totally believe she is a castrated male.

In all other aspects, however, she is entirely convincing, turning in a sparky, energetic performance as she splashes across the wood and water of Robson’s set, narrating her own story with vim and variety. Robbie Jack and Ian Sexon lend able support as brother and father, poking their heads out of doors and cupboards and matching the novel’s surreal imagination with a series of rabbit costumes and puppet characters.

Nigel Dunn’s dissonant music is strong too, leading to a confident production that will entertain fans of the book even as it underplays one of its key tensions.

(The Wasp Factory plays at An Lanntair, Stornoway, on 3 May, and Eden Court Theatre, Inverness, on 28-29 May)

© Mark Fisher, 2008

Links

• The Wasp Factory