HOMERS. To 9 November.

Scotland

HOMERS
by Iain F MacLeod

Traverse Theatre to 19 October 2002 then tour to 9 November
Runs 2hr One interval
Review Timothy Ramsden 13 October

A warm, comic piece that offers rich dramatic flavours.It's not that the Traverse has gone Greek; homers are young people sent to make new homes with volunteer families. In this case, it's 14 year old Alex and Mary, sent from Glasgow to the islands. It's 1967 but this is remote from the southern decadence known as swinging Britain. These islands are tight, godfearing communities. And if you don't fear God His representative on earth, the man of the house, has a belt that'll make you fear him.

After the Edinburgh Festival production fever, this is the Traverse's sole in-house autumn show, though it will reach out into the Highlands and islands. So it had better be good - and it is. MacLeod uses language as a first means of expressing cultural fissures, with the Gaelic phrases (helpfully projected in English translation) which puzzle the new arrivals followed later by apparent nonsense from the caricatured, cross-gender-played local schoolteacher and her like.

He has the ability one reflected well in Philip Howard's fluent and finely acted production to use comedy and dramatic seriousness to play off each other in an Elizabethan manner, rather than to counteract each other's effectiveness.

And he builds a fearful sense of a closed, oppressive society, one ready to reject as people the newcomers it has accepted as charity cases and as the realistically repellent family son Michael spits out in a moment of childhood cruelty a source of income.

It's an oppression that works too against the cliff-dwelling Priest, the existing loner, feared and disliked as an outsider and a Catholic. While it's his own son who actually seeks to assault Mary, Calum suspects Priest of improper intentions. Ironically, Priest does see Mary as a potential partner, though on a consenting basis.

And it's Alex who gets the consent, leading to Mary becoming pregnant. In the end, with Alex back from banishment from a job with a Glasgow butcher a clownshow scene with a grisly conclusion harmony's achieved and Calum expropriated. There's a warm, unsentimental conclusion a happy end, you might say with Catherine Ann, the mother who long ago accepted the pair as if her own, and Alex exchanging Gaelic, and the young visitors, home at last, holding hands.

Alex: Alastair G. Bruce
Mary: Mary Gapinski
Calum/Miss Scott/Alasdair Mor: Iain Macrae
Catherine Ann/Andrena/Whaler: Annie Grace
Michael/Minister/Shooey: Alasdair Macrae
Christopher the Ceard/Mrs Gunn/Priest/Pig: Stephen Docherty

Director: Philip Howard
Designer: Mary Robson
Lighting: Renny Robertson
Sound: Quee MacAuthur
Composer: Anna Mhoireach
Voice and Dialect coach: Ros Steen

2002-10-21 14:55:57