Tron Theatre, Glasgow, and touring March/April 2010

THE THEME of fathers failing to communicate with their sons is an old one. It is an obsession of today’s animated movies and it is central to Miracle Man, Douglas Maxwell’s new play for the National Theatre of Scotland’s tdf trilogy.

If Ossian MacDonald, a little respected PE teacher, were in a fairy story, he would have ventured out into the world as a young boy, completed a daring task and returned a grown man, probably with a wife in tow. But in The Miracle Man, the archetype is broken. For as long as his father, a celebrated man of letters, is alive, Ossian is trapped in an eternal adolescence, stuck like Hamlet desperately waiting for the throne to be free.

The touring cast: Charlene Boyd, Ben Presley, Sally Reid, Ross Allan and Shabana Bakhsh (© Alan McAteer).

He is well into his 30s, yet he is as scared of the grown-up world as the teenagers he teaches. That the children don’t take him seriously is unsurprising. The he can’t take himself seriously is a problem. He regards himself as a fake – just like the 18th century poet from whom he gets his name – and feels helpless in the face of his father’s great achievements.

What he needs is a miracle, just like the mixed-up pupils who have decided to take an oath of virginity and to follow an evangelical abstinence campaigner. The certainties of this miracle man’s values – purity, sanctity and saving yourself for marriage – seem a safer bet than the complications of adulthood.

In Vicky Featherstone’s production, Maxwell demonstrates his usual gift for funny dialogue and comic characterisation. Keith Fleming as Ossian and Jimmy Chisholm as the headmaster fizz with the kind of eccentric detail we remember from our own less stable teachers. Although the pupils see them as authority figures, we can tell they are scarcely in control of their own emotions, never mind the school.

But despite the liveliness of the dialogue and the energy of the performances, the play is long-winded and unsatisfying. It doesn’t help that I had to read the script to find out the nature of the miracle that Ossian supposedly performs in the confusing climactic scene. But even with clearer staging, the teacher’s achievement would seem to be merely a piece of good fortune and not something brought about by the awakening of any personal strength.

In other words, he does not deserve his redemption and it is hard for us to feel he is ready to graduate to the next stage of his life. The fate of the children and their virginity rings, meanwhile, is unrelated to Ossian’s journey, which means the conclusion fails to resonate in the way it promises. The result is a play that, despite its many highlights, is more puzzling than purposeful.

Cathy Forde’s Empty is also part of the package of three plays being toured by the National Theatre of Scotland, all pitched at the teenage audience.

We’ve all read the newspaper reports. A couple goes away for the weekend leaving their teenage son or daughter in charge of the house. “No parties,” they warn and the youngster is happy to agree. Except word gets out that someone has a free house – or an “empty” as it is known in Forde’s play – and suddenly one guest becomes a deluge.

The drinks cabinet is raided, the records are broken, the ornaments are smashed and mayhem ensues. Pretty soon, the neighbours are on the street and the police are at the door.

Sounds familiar? Yes, of course it does, and that is the primary failing of Empty. Taking place over one horrendous end-of-term evening in the middle-class home of 16-year-old Col (Ben Presley), the play describes in blow-by-blow detail how a quiet night in turns into an orgy of sex, drugs and debauchery. Having invited a girl he fancies to share some time on the couch, Col opens the floodgates for every teenager, biker and headcase in town to show up.

If Forde’s purpose is to demonstrate how one thing can lead to another, she succeeds. In Vicky Featherstone’s production, the energetic cast effectively chart the staging posts from minor irresponsibility to criminal damage, showing how easily a house can be wrecked by otherwise well-behaved young people.

The problem is that one domestic disaster is much like another. Col can react no differently to the offstage sound of vomiting on the kitchen floor than he can to the reports of sex in his parents’ bed. In other plays, such events change or challenge the characters, but here they merely pile up in a tedious litany of bad things happening.

The only development is when Col joins in, broken by his loss of control and egged on by the discovery of his mother having cancer. You hope this storyline will give the play some greater meaning, but it emerges too late to drive the drama anywhere more interesting.

The play’s predictable arc leaves us to concentrate on the typically teenage group of frightening girls and inadequate boys. It’s true to say Forde has an ear for the inane chatter of this generation, but having to listen to it for 90 minutes is very dull. The inanity increases as alcohol takes its hold, so you know the conversation will only get duller. A great party, perhaps, but not a great play.

The third play, Rob Drummond’s Mr Write, is a transformative joy and the one great achievement of this season. The skill of a magician is to make something out of nothing. It is the rabbit out of a hat or the playing card that turns up in a shirt pocket. As a theatrical magician, Drummond is a writer who makes a play appear from nowhere.

He begins with a blank stage. It could not be blanker. He is sat with his laptop in front of a white backdrop on an equally white floor. This is the nothing from which Mr Write will spring.

As we take our seats, Drummond is already on stage, typing out lines that are projected behind him. We find ourselves engaged in a voiceless conversation involving bad jokes and silly requests. By the time he starts speaking, Drummond has made it clear there will be nothing stuffy about this show. We are to leave our mobile phones switched on and be as forthcoming as we can.

The laissez-faire atmosphere adds to the illusion of chaos cleverly cultivated by the performer as he gets someone on stage – tonight it is 16-year-old Campbell – and subjects her to a long list of questions, scribbling each answer onto the backdrop in marker pen. We learn of her ambitions, her neuroses, her family and her memories, all of it written behind her in a jumble as seemingly random as the jumble of our own lives.

But for all his good-natured casualness, his willingness to go with the flow and to respond to the mood of the room, Drummond is absolutely in control. We realise this as soon as the lights go down and the spotlight comes up on Campbell while, offstage, Drummond starts to type.

Steadily behind Campbell, a story appears, one line at a time, drawn from the raw material of her life. Before our eyes, Drummond is giving shape to the apparent disorder, fashioning a wish-fulfilment fantasy – complete with sound effects – in which Campbell overcomes her demons and achieves her goals.

Not only has he pulled a rabbit out of a hat, but he has made us feel his subject’s life is worthy of dramatisation. The unspoken moral of the story is that if she can change her life in fiction then so can all of us in real life.

That is an inspiring message, but it is Drummond’s final gesture that is the most touching of all. Having reached the end, he prints out the newly written script and gives it to Campbell. It is a gift of creativity and potential magicked from the ether.

The plays can be seen at Eden Court in Inverness and The Lemon Tree in Aberdeen in late March-early April.

© Mark Fisher, 2010

Links

• National Theatre of Scotland
• Eden Court Theatre
• Mark Fisher’s Scottish Theatre Blog