IF ONLY.... To 12 April.

Edinburgh

IF ONLY...
by Michael Tremblay

Royal Lyceum Theatre To 12 April 2003
Tue-Sat 7.45pm Mat Sat 2.30pm Sun 6 April 2.30pm (with free playroom)
Audio-described: 3 April, 5 April 2.30pm (Touch tour 5 April 12.30pm)
BSL Signed: 8 April
Runs 1hr 30min No interval

TICKETS: 0131 248 4848
boxoffice@lyceum.org.uk
Review: Timothy Ramsden 29 March

A gem of a play in a jewel of a production.After a lifetime's playwrighting, gay French-Canadian Tremblay looks back with affecting affection at his first theatre resource and inspiration - his mother.

Peter Kelly's Narrator opens with a long anti-fanfare, snaking his way through references to most of European theatre's great characters and moments, telling us these are what won't be happening tonight. This happens front curtain, as lighting picks out the Lyceum's red plush and gilt-frame theatricality.

It's the last such splash until the end; most that follows is set in what might be the mouth of a moonlit tunnel of memory, from little Narrator's childhood days, told off for throwing ice at passing cars, through Nana's way of extending and elaborating a tiny truth in a way any playwright could take to and learn from, to her final cancer-pained days.

Both Tremblay's script and Muriel Romanes' outstanding production (surely a Scottish theatre-year highlight) give a fine example of how much theatre can gain from using its various elements to support, rather than stifle, good acting.

Then, cheekily, design comes into elaborate play for a ghastly Hollywood-style send-off which is also Nana's dream-finale, the Narrator's repayment for all he's received, and a determination that after all her agonies, she won't go out with a whimper.

Flaming mock-classical pillars, ascension in an ornate balloon-basket, are beautifully undercut by her naive comments. How bad the scenery looks from behind comments this forthright woman who never did get introduced to the stars and sophistication her determinedly successful son came to know thanks to her inspiration.

But for most of the engrossing, thrilling, amusing 90 minutes these two fine Scottish actors hold you in their palms. Kelly moves swiftly from past to narrating present, helped by Chris Davey's equally quick-change lighting.

But he'll not mind it being said that McCallum is the ruinaway star of this show, capturing perfectly a woman who's voluble, articulate, intelligent but not highly educated. So the thoughts come out spontaneously, rather than deliberately arranged. And, without ever losing clarity, McCallum shows us the clipped-opening snatches at sentences of a woman who has other things on her mind.

She's an outstanding representative of Brecht's poems about theatre of the streets: voice, expression and gestures providing spontaneous mini-dramas of ideas and recollections. McCallum's Nana is 110% humanity and, in her later scenes, an eidetic image of humanity selflessly over-riding suffering to think of others. In its way If Only... does offer many of those great moments it claims to be denying us tonight.

The Narrator: Peter Kelly
Nana: Eileen McCallum

Director: Muriel Romanes
Designer: Saul Radomsky
Lighting: Chris Davey

2003-03-31 13:10:17