THE MILL LAVVIES. To 23 November.
Dundee
THE MILL LAVVIES
by Chris Rattrey
Dundee Rep Theatre To 23 November 2002
Mon-Sat 7.45pm Mat 16 November 2.30pm
Audio described 14,16 Mat November
Runs 2hr 10min One interval
TICKETS 01382 223530
www.dundeerep.co.uk
Review Timothy Ramsden 9 November
An apparent popular success returns: easygoing lavatory humour.
These lavvies seem to double as the mill-workers' social centre: the grown-up equivalent of behind the bike-sheds. If there's a cigarette to be smoked, an argument to be had or a social diary to be finalised - or even if it's no more than work to be avoided - here's where it happens in Rattray's comedy. It's simplistic, rough-hewn and enormously popular, filling Dundee Rep with an audience - judging by the high enquiry quotient for the wherabouts of the auditorium, the various seating rows and, aptly, the toilets - which includes many newcomers to the Rep. Good on it.
It's local, it's familiar and it's undemanding, though there is a surprisingly downbeat element in the end. In Hull, it'd be John Godber; in South Wales Frank Vickery: writers who know their kingdoms and treat them with easy familiarity, sharing the kind of bond which links 'Erchie' - injected by John Buick with the spot-on delivery of a music-hall comedian and the work-lined look of a man who's spent his career in the toilets - with the tool of his trade, his sweeping-brush.
Its theft by Rodney Matthew's vicious Henny woulg be a major part of the plot if there were any such thing. It is still a neat thread to string together several comic situations.
Which we'd better enjoy on their own terms, because these characters keep coming back with high disregard for likelihood. Still, they're neatly contrasted - Matthew's destructively angry youth with Andrew Clark's placidly helpful Kevin, dreaming of the musical career Rattray went on to give him in the sequel Changing Kevin's Story.
Usually, work-based comedies set in male environments smuggle in a female or two: some secretary, or girlfriend. Rattray's right here to stick to his all-male world, childish and definitely from a past era: an age of secure employment, with workers bossed about by blood-pressurised management, and little by way of health and sdafety.
Adding to the gentle fun is Michael Marra's genre-tinged music, often further enlivened by small-scale big production numbers, with a chorus emerging from every aperture the stage provides: emerging from lockers or peering suddely on-beat over the urinals' top. And things are never funnier than in Marra's number educating 'Erchie' on the whereabouts of North Africa in terms of a world mapped out according to the districts of Dundee.
Kevin: Andrew Clark
Archie: John Buick
Jim: Michael Marra
Henny: Rodney Matthew
Robert: Robert Paterson
Thornton: Peter Spence
Geordie: Alexander West
Director: Hamish Glen
Designer: Monika Nisbet
Lighting: Richard Moffatt
Music: Michael Marra
Choreographer: Stephen Prickett
2002-11-10 19:02:43