Pitlochry Festival Theatre, Pitlochry, 19 August 2009, and in repertory until October

The Life of Stuff - Alan Steele, Shirley Darroch and Irene Allan

I ADMIT to making the trip to Pitlochry as much to see the audience as to have another look at Simon Donald’s 17-year-old play. The Life of Stuff is a black comedy that features drug taking, a severed body part, considerable violence and lots of swearing. It is as far from the sedate image of the theatre-in-the-hills as it is possible for a play to be.

Even in terms of the less familiar choices artistic director John Durnin has made for the final play in previous seasons, such as Conor McPherson’s The Weir in 2004 and David Greig’s Outlying Islands in 2008, this one was a huge risk to put in front of an audience renowned for its genteel tastes.

And what do you know? They absolutely love it. No walk outs, no tutting, just hoots of approval as Irene Allan’s Evelyn freezes to the spot having taken drugs that were probably carpet cleaner and George Ray’s Fraser remains in his underpants rather than wear the dirty clothes of Christopher Daley’s eczema-ridden Leonard.

More than once the action has to stop while a gag gets a round of applause. I don’t remember that happening even on the play’s debut at Edinburgh’s Traverse in 1992. It’s a tremendous vindication for Durnin’s programming. If they can take this, they can take anything.

Thanks to designer Charles Cusick Smith and the resources of the Pitlochry production department, we get a full sense of the inner-city warehouse nightclub where Davey Arbogast (Alan Steele) and Willie Dobie (Gavin Jon Wright) are laying out the beginnings of an underworld empire.

Switching with reasonable efficiency from basement to rooftop to dance floor, Durnin’s production reminds us that the play predates the cult TV series The Wire by a decade in its portrayal of outlaw capitalists exploiting a generation of young people who are interested only in their next fix. This being Scotland and not Baltimore, they don’t do it very well.

Not everything works about the show. It loses energy before the interval when it’s really not clear what way the convoluted story is heading, though things pick up again in the second half. And neither Steel nor Wright are nasty enough to be credible gangsters. But the young cast give it their all, the jokes keep firing and the whole thing adds a refreshingly rough edge to the all-Scottish summer season.

© Mark Fisher, 2009

Links

• Pitlochry Festival Theatre

• Mark Fisher’s Scottish Theatre Blog