SPENDING FRANK. To 22 April.

Dundee/Perth

SPENDING FRANK
by Alistair Hewitt

Borderline Theatre Company Tour to 22 April 2006
Runs 2hr One interval

Dundee Rep 11-15 April
TICKETS: 01382 223530 then
Perth Theatre 18-22 April
TICKETS: 0845 6126322
Review: Timothy Ramsden 6 April at Eastgate Theatre Peebles

Light comedy that grows darker as you watch.
I

I’m thinking of giving up the day job for a bit, nipping north of the border and re-emerging as Tim McRamsden, conceptual artist. It’s a good wheeze because the Scottish Arts Council has just chopped funding to several theatre companies, including Borderline (who are touring Alan Hewitt’s play) for being too “audience focused”.

As a conceptual artist all my work will of course remain in conceptual form, so there will be nothing to see and therefore no audience upon which to focus. All I’ll need do is draw the dosh, put up my feet (conceptually speaking) until it’s time to photocopy the grant application for next time around.

I’ll need to be quick though: the brilliant arts council who came up with this idea is about to be merged with an organisation called Scottish Screen (perhaps they misheard it as ‘Scottish Scream’ so thought they ought to do something to get the theatre companies to join in the noise).

I’d assumed that arts councils were given public money to help ensure the public received the chance to experience high-quality work, especially such as could not be financially self-sustaining, either in itself or in the places it visited (for example, a huge-cast classic might never attract enough ticket money; a smaller play might in one theatre, but become uneconomic with all the costs of an extensive tour added on).

But no; the idea of public money being used to provide a service to the public is seemingly too “audience focused”. Might the concept spread? Could doctors and nurses find health funding withdrawn for being too “patient focused” if they actually treat people? Should the sewage system be disconnected from homes and offices as too “public focused”?

Then, I thought it must be a coded term which I, as an English interloper, could not understand. Perhaps “audience focused” was understood in Scotland as meaning “populist”, providing work with public funding that ought to be possible commercially , or a euphemism for poor quality. So I bent a few artistic Scottish ears (none from the companies I’d heard names as potential victims of the cuts). And nobody had any idea where the Scottish Arts Council is coming from. I’m left with the view that the Council should be not so much merged as submerged – preferably in a high concentrate of reality.

II

Which leaves little room for the play. Fittingly, as shenanigans like these must divert energy away from the job of artistic production (not something affecting this show, which was touring before SAC’s surprise announcement). Borderline aren’t well-served by their publicity image either, showing a woman from neck to calves holding a pregnancy kit and a bottle of wine. Had whoever was responsible read the play, which is all about what’s going on in the head of Anna, who tells her story from early adulthood to the present? Her problem is precisely that she never reaches the point where a pregnancy test becomes relevant.

It’s no secret that Anna killed husband Frank by rigging faulty electrical wiring. Julie Austin’s light, apparently cheery manner in telling her story carries the suppressed energy of someone disappointed by the 2 men in her life and let down by her one-time friend. There’s an inner certainty to Austin’s Anna, who has honed her self-definition on rough knocks and the confidently upbeat women she meets.

These are portrayed by Angela Darcy as people who, blessed with luck or lack of self-understanding, blithely avoid the things that trouble Anna. And her troubles are focused in Frank, cheery enough while it suits him but, as Barrie Hunter’s spin-on-a-sixpence turn to cruelty and spite shows, marrying Anna as a convenience, with no intention of providing the child for whom she has so patiently waited.

Hewitt’s story flows cleanly through a mix of Anna’s narration and enacted scenes. Choice, buzzword of the moment, doesn’t attract her as she lives in the shadow of her actions, still childless. In one fine scene she visits a mother whose baby she temporarily abducted, seeking punishment or forgiveness. Neither is offered and when the mother comes round her pram to confront Anna as a “monster” the brief scene catapults their irreconcilable views into hard reality.

Director Tony Cownie’s as good as anyone knowing his work would expect with the early comedy but he’s as keen with the later, darker scenes, up to the deserted stage at Hewitt’s deliberately indeterminate conclusion.

Anna: Julie Austin
Margaret etc: Angela Darcy
Frank etc: Barrie Hunter

Director: Tony Cownie
Designer: Becky Minto
Lighting: Mike Lancaster

2006-04-10 12:01:06