Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh, 29 April 2008

Nova Scotia

THANKS TO The Slab Boys, John Byrne is forever associated with a particularly urban experience. His ribald 1978 comedy about the antics of Phil McCann and Spanky Farrell in the colour mixing room of a Paisley carpet factory encapsulated an era in the 1950s when the young working class were about to overthrow the staid habits of their parents.

But Byrne wasn’t only writing about his generation; he was also writing about himself. Like McCann, he had a yearning to escape to art school, a raw talent and a mother with a history of schizophrenia. The Slab Boys – and the two plays that quickly followed it – were works of fiction, but the autobiographical element was strong.

That means that when Byrne decided to catch up with the same characters in Nova Scotia, he thought not of Paisley but of Nairn. For it is there in Moray that the playwright and artist now lives with his partner Tilda Swinton, the Oscar-winning star of Michael Clayton, and their ten-year-old twins.

And it’s pretty much there that Phil McCann now lives, the back garden of his grand home realised in unfashionably realistic detail by Michael Taylor in this high-profile Edinburgh debut production. The children’s toys are scattered in the grass, McCann’s young wife is a Turner Prize-nominated conceptual artist and his old mate Spanky is about to turn up after 30 years living the rock’n’roll dream.

Where once Byrne wrote of wage packets, the staff dance and other urban concerns, now his backdrop features low-flying military aircraft, posh country clubs and the challenges of rural transport.

By writing from first-hand experience, Byrne establishes a vivid sense of place, one populated with credible characters, not least in Paddy Cunneen’s well-acted production. But while it’s novel to see a play about people heading for old age, it’s hard to feel the force of what the play is really about.

Byrne wants to explore what it is to be McCann in his 60s, creatively threatened by the younger generation, running against the clock to make his own artistic mark and coming to terms with revelations about his incestuous parentage. Any of this could be meat for a compelling drama, except that in Nova Scotia none of it drives the action.

Paul Morrow as McCann is at the centre of a storm, but it is one over which he has no control. Instead of setting the events of the play in motion, he is a victim of a series of outside interventions, making it hard for us to see where the play is heading. There are some good gags, but even the laughs are not vintage Byrne, and the lack of dramatic momentum makes Byrne’s undigested autobiographical revelations look merely indulgent.

© Mark Fisher, 2008

Links

• Traverse Theatre