TAILS YOU LOSE. To 25 August.
Edinburgh - Fringe
TAILS YOU LOSE
by John Finnemore
Pleasance Below. To 25 August 2003
except 12 August 2.45pm
Runs 1hr 20min No interval
TICKETS: 0131 556 6550
Review: Timothy Ramsden 4 August
A dilemma kept ricocheting interestingly round a complex three-way relationship.It starts looking like a menacing story, young Stephen, miserable and intense, calling on the older Victor. In his shabby. make-do home he's clearly ill-at-ease with this visitor. Stephen never misses a chance, almost compulsive in his take-up of any hint from Victor of a conversational challenge or sidestep.
Victor, perhaps because he's older, seems able to let some dangerous corners go by. But his twitching right leg's a giveaway. As things proceed, and we find out Stephen is his son, Victor's leg might be telling us more than we know.
More, too, than he wants to know. For this soon settles into being an issue play. Specifically, concerning Huntingdon's disease, a progressive brain-rotting debility that can alter personality -and is inherited on a strict 50% basis.
Modern medicine's produced a test to see if an individual's inherited the disease, but Victor - at 51 in the peak age-group for onset - is as determined not to know as his son is to find out. Stephen has a quarter-century to spend with Rebecca, either planning to cope or knowing he's free of the threat.
Trouble is, if Stephen finds out about himself, it will send heavy hints (or certain knowledge, depending on the result) Victor's way. A pact means Stephen undertakes to keep his result secret. Not so easy, when a slight reaction can seem to reveal a lot.
What makes John Finnemore's script more than a simple problem play is technical skill - we can work out characters' ages and histories without exposition ever becoming laboured or obvious - and his use of Victor's keenness for card-games to impact on the plot. Poker and the bluff-game Cheat parallel the keeping of the secret.
And tensions between the young couple, with complicating factors in Stephen's business growing from his personality, enrich the mixture.
Marianne Levy's cast play with good low-key realism. Pleasance Below's tiny stage isn't the place to encourage movement. But more physical expression and some moments of greater intensity would have propelled the piece at a more concentrated level.
Still it's an intelligent look at the way conflicting aims and family resentments built over the years can complicate already difficult decisions.
Victor: Phil Moyse
Stephen: Tim Hyam
Rebecca: Imogen Rands
Director: Marianne Levy
2003-08-05 22:11:07