Tramway, Glasgow, 17 February 2010, and touring

THIS IS the second play on the trot in which writer Davey Anderson has used storytelling as his key technique. Like his spirited version of the adventures of Zorro at Edinburgh’s Traverse Theatre before Christmas, Clutter Keeps Company requires the actors to slip in and out of character and take turns as a narrator.

Clutter Keeps Company - Keith Macpherson (Jim)and Scott Fletcher (Stevie) - Photo by Eamonn McGoldrick

It means all the action happens in a “he said/she said” frame, an approach that plays to theatre’s strengths. It encourages direct audience address, fast scene changes and a dressing-up box atmosphere that allows us to accept an actor as a middle-aged mum one moment and a teenager the next.

Fellow playwright David Greig has used the same technique, most recently in his hit comedy Midsummer and also in his teenager-friendly Yellow Moon. It is this play that Clutter Keeps Company most closely resembles, and not only because actor Keith Macpherson starred in both.

The two plays concern a son trying to reconnect with a long-lost father after a spot of criminal behaviour (in this case more imagined than real) and a trek to a far-away Scottish destination (Greig chose a Highland estate, Anderson goes for Millport). They both regard teenage experiences as worthy dramatic material.

But where Greig used his story to explore the pressure on teenagers to conform or rebel, touching on big issues such as self-harm along the way, Anderson is much less clear about what is at stake for his characters.

Money is tight for Nicola Miles-Wildin’s single mother, but you could hardly regard her treatment of her children – Stevie (Scott Fletcher) and Julie (Jo Freer) – as neglect. Julie’s romance with fairground worker Jim (Macpherson) looks like it will lead her into trouble, but he is not as sleazy as he at first appears and nothing comes of it. The arrival of a family of Mormons next door is similarly without friction.

The only possible source of dramatic tension is Stevie’s Asperger syndrome, but even this amounts to little more than a penchant for tidiness and a liking of big numbers. You could argue his obsessive behaviour triggers the events of the play – he gets into trouble after trailing his sister to Jim’s deserted fairground – but it would be harder to say that the story resolves anything, either to do with his medical condition or his family relationships.

This failure to establish a central dilemma makes Clutter Keeps Company seem purposeless, which in turn, despite the lively presentation by Birds of Paradise, makes it feel much longer than the 80-minute running time.

Clutter Keeps Company visits Mull Theatre, Tobermory (23 February); Taynuilt Village Hall (24 February); An Lanntair, Stornoway (26 February); New Deer Public Hall, Turriff (2 March); Dornie Hall, Dornie (4 March); Hopeman Memorial Hall (6 March); Tullynessie & Forbes Hall, Alford (16 March).

© Mark Fisher, 2010

Links

• Birds of Paradise

• Mark Fisher’s Scottish Theatre Blog