EAST COAST CHICKEN SUPPER. To 28 August.

Edinburgh.

EAST COAST CHICKEN SUPPER
by Martin J Taylor.

Traverse Theatre (Traverse 1) To 28 August 2005.
Tue-Sun Various times.
Runs 1hr 40min No interval.

TICKETS: 0131 228 1404.
www.traverse.co.uk
Review: Timothy Ramsden 16 August.

Debut from a writer with a keen sense of theatre.
Write about what you know, they tell newcomers. Martin J Taylor's certainly writing about where he knows, his home pitch of Fife (across the Forth from Edinburgh), whether or not he's acquainted with the small-town vilence and drug-dewaling of his debut play. It's notable for its restraint. As one character says of the drug-operatives trio sharing the home where it's set, they may not be from good families but they're not from bad ones.

Taylor uses low burlesque, applying manners, subtly-detailed thought processes and conversational patterns to characters with lower social status and education than might be expected to use them. This gives a comic formality, while their own surprise at each other's Thesaurus-tugging vocabulary occasionally flung into the conversation goes alongside a spare use of the demotic to give the characters dignity, belying popular images of 2 drug-dealers wondering where their partner's been for the last year. They greet him like a lost son returned to the fold.

Even the local hardman who comes to warn them off, giving them 7 daysto take their drugs out of town, is someone arriving at an age when he'd rather settle down than return to prison. His threats, masked behind politeness, peter out mid-flow. The only real violence comes when one of the friends feels his gourmet efforts with the title repast go unappreciated.

It's an entertaining piece with 4 finely-judged performances catching the script's mix of realism and stylisation in a production well up to Richard Wilson's perpetual high standard of pacing and detail.

Chicken Supper's a welcome debut from a writer with a sense of ironic humour, a sharp ear for dialogue and a sense of how to use a character who remains silent for long stretches. It's given a first-rate Traverse treatment. If it's promising rather than a major statement about Scottish playwrighting such as might be looked for from this theatre's Festival contribution, perhaps that comes elsewhere in the programme.

Stew: Paul Blair.
Gibb: Garry Collins.
Fred: Pasul Rattray.
Malone: Malcolm Shields.

Director: Richard Wilson.
Designer: Fiona Watt.
Lighting: Johanna Town.
Sound: John Harris.
Associate director: Lorne Campbell.

2005-08-18 11:09:30