MR PLACEBO. To 1 March.
Edinburgh
MR PLACEBO
by Isabel Wright
Traverse Theatre (Traverse 1) To 1 March 2003
Tue-Sun 8pm
Audio-described 22 February
BSL Signed 26 February
then Drum Theatre, Plymouth from 6 March 2003
Runs 1hr 25min No interval
TICKETS: 0131 228 1404 (Traverse)
www.traverse.co.uk
Review Timothy Ramsden 16 February
Wright goes wrong: Mr Placebo fails to please.We all wish the Traverse were better funded and could produce more in-house productions. But the Traverse can best argue its case on stage rather than in funding application forms.
As it's chosen to foreground its Associate Playwright this spring (her translation of a French-Canadian work follows), a knockout new play would be ideal. This is what the Traverse can produce.
Ms Wright is, in journalese, a hot young property of Scottish playwrighting. Last year, Boilerhouse made a searing evening of Blooded, her scorching story of a group of girls on the edge of the adult world.
Now there's this cold porridge. How could it happen? Tattytours commercial theatre would be hard-put to come up with worse. It's, kind of, a Hull Truck play - a given situation and easy laughs - but John Godber might have sleepless nights wondering how to give this script life.
Whether or not Wilson Milam lost any shuteye, he's done nothing except bang the whole dead weight along - with, at least, a strong Scottish cast who play with a will. You just wish they could be deployed in a better example of Scottish playwriting - there has to be better.
Four men line up on hospital beds to trial a new drug (what new drug? - don't ask). There's the usual mix: the essential catalyst of a violent, foul-mouthed scarred personality: outlet for dialogue wit and ultimately headed for defeat. The type's there in every male-group drama: think The Long and the Short and the Tall, think Neville's Island.
This is Howie: he has, of course, his follower - a decent lad left alone but helping move the plot (such as it is here) along under the baleful influence of a stronger, destructive personality.
That's Ben. And, fortunately we have Tariq, who as imminent victim of Howie's Ben-assisted racism is a tactful non-character, played with apt discretion by Parvez Qadir. So, there's a bit more of a theme - though the theatrical 'charge' of racism is exploited to motor the play a few yards further along its weary road.
This leaves (apart from the male nurse Silas - Glenn Chapman given a thankless cipher of a role) Jude - an intellectual cut or two above the others, into teaching and music criticism and innocently allowing class as well as race to pretend to a thematic presence.
And, naturally enough, as working-class characters are far easier handled by most authors as mouthpieces and types than as developed individuals, it's Jude we follow as he strays into the private room where his father faces terminal illness.
No-one seems to know what to do with Jude's father - thoughJohn Stahl does his best. The designer's shoved these scenes into a raised corner, the director sits the characters there and lets the staging cliches flow. Scriptwise here, the play's into a terminal condition of its own: middle-class generation gap angst. If there is anything new to say on the father/son love that can't cough up its name for the years of accreted bile, it's soon evident it won't be said here.
Jude's final demands that dad be given real drugs, not the inactive lookalike placebos administered to a proportion of any drugs trial participants, is embarrassing: emotionally, an orgasm without foreplay in a cack-handed evening that should have been humanely disposed of before its stillbirth.
For Isabel Wright, enough of Placebos. Remember Blooded: it should be back to the real stuff now.
Tariq: Parvez Qadir
Ben: Garry Collins
Jude: Benjamin Davies
Howie: Stuart Bowman
Silas: Glenn Chapman
Frank: John Stahl
Director: Wilson Milam
Designer: Dick Bird
Lighting: Neil Austin
Sound: Gareth Fry
2003-02-21 13:45:22