MELODY. To 15 April.
Glasgow
MELODY
by Douglas Maxwell
Tron Theatre To 15 April 2006
Tue-Sat 8pm
Runs 1hr 30min No interval
TICKETS: 0141 552 4267
www.tron.co.uk
Review: Timothy Ramsden 7 April
Brisk comedy as pasts catch up with people.
Douglas Maxwell certainly knows how to start things off with a bang, as Una Maclean’s Olive apparently sleeps while young John urgently practises his TV-interviewer act for Melody’s cellphone camera. Nothing’s what it seems, and Melody itself is far from harmonious. Behind this opening lies a series of past events, unravelled like the opening picture of Tom Stoppard’s one-acter After Magritte.
Maxwell’s play’s a single act too, but it also follows a complex 3-act structure, flowery curtains swishing to-and-fro between its trio of scenes. Why young computer-nerd John is here with checkout-operator Melody, just how asleep (or not) Olive is and why she’s so hostile to the others, are questions to which the identity of an unannounced visitor (which may, or not, be as in the cast-list) gets added.
This visitor would have been announced if technophobe Melody had opened her emails. There emerges a pattern of guilt from the past (a story which coincidentally tallies with a strand of Borderline’s current production Spending Frank) and discontents in the present, both of which fuel the aggravation. Then, in a final piece of footplay, just as things seem generally resolved, comes a hefty knock of the door from a character who might or not have been our there in the stormy night, someone bringing home the guilt. It’s a situation refracted (aptly, given the time of year) from Strindberg’s Easter.
All this is often abrasively funny, and there are several fine performances. Lynn Ferguson times lines so they appear fresh yet always logical; Bryan Lowe is splendidly splenetic, along with his self-pity as victim of Olive’s sudden outbursts of tea-flinging. And Maclean’s Olive is a wicked old woman who takes what’s given her out of necessity, never wasting an opportunity to bite deep as possible the hand providing it.
Mhairi Steenbock doesn’t quite define the flinty outlines of rage in their visitor, but the character’s sketched in well enough. Ultimately this strong cast and Lorne Campbell’s pulsing production serve Maxwell’s comedy very well. It offers plenty of good fun upfront, though none of the shading that would give it memorable depth.
John: Bryan Lowe
Melody: Lynn Ferguson
Olive: Una Maclean
Ashley: Mhairi Steenbock
Director: Lorne Campbell
Designer: Jon Bausor
Lighting: Philip Gladwell
Composer: Max Richter
Voice coach: Ros Steen
2006-04-09 23:55:00