THREE THOUSAND TROUBLED THREADS. To 3 September.

Edinburgh

THREE THOUSAND TROUBLED THREADS
by Chiew Siah Tei

Royal Lyceum Theatre To 3 September 2005
Wed-Sat 7.30pm Mat Sat 2.30pm
Runs 2hr 45min One interval

TICKETS: 0131 473 2000
www.eif.org.uk
Review: Timothy Ramsden 27 August at Byre Theatre St Andrews

Over-specific, under-dramatic script makes for a tedious time.There are lots of good ideas here. Edinburgh International Festival brings in St Andrew's Byre Theatre (which could do with more new productions) and Scottish women's touring company Stellar Quines with a multi-media script about one of the big themes of the age, racial integration - there are characters in Threads' Glasgow from both Chinese and, more familiarly, Italian backgrounds.

But ideas are one thing and a successful play's another. Despite a director and a dramaturg with strong track-records, this is a dead duck. It is a fish out of water. It is not a play.

Chiew Siah Tei has worked on TV scripts and made a film, but this piece is more redolent of her experience as a novelist. Some novelists assert playwriting is simple; plays are all dialogue, which is the easy part of writing novels.

But novel dialogue is different from theatre dialogue. Most meaning in speech comes from tone of voice, facial and body expressions etc. In a novel dialogue has to do all the work. On stage it has to leave room for those other things, done by actors and shaped by directors. In this play (the title refers directly to hairs, metaphorically to people's roots) things are painfully spelled out.

The author seems to assume that because something interests her it will automatically interest us as she enumerates point after point without giving her characters the spark of independent life which would make them interesting. In several ways here, less would be so, so much more.

The more self-conscious elements become laboured. Madam Chan lovingly keeps mementos of her past, the Chinese music and dress which her Scots-born daughter Ying (Sara Houghton, bravely fighting to give the character reality) rejects. Her obsession with these artefacts is dwelt on long after the point's been made. And revelations are held back for no purpose. When Ying's Uncle finally says he's hated the family restaurant business, it comes out of the blue, and so carries no resonance.

One way with dud scripts is to trick them out with theatricality and there's certainly plenty of that, most effectively a film sequence showing Ying's Scottish friend, an ill-developed character only present for a thematic point, and his girlfriend making their way through the Chinese desert as he loses his way, another person culturally adrift.

One thing had me rivetted. Scenes in Gioia's salon have a filmed background of the street outside. Whatever the time of day the same sequence of vehicles is passing. Each time a black saloon stops outside the salon. No-one gets out. Nothing happens. Then it speeds off. An intended heist whose perpetrators chickened-out at the last moment?

No; it must be traffic lights just out of sight, for the same stop-start occurs with a different set of recurrent vehicles when the salon's changed hands. The point is, this video showed things happening and leaves the audience to work out why. That way we become intrigued, become involved. If only that were true for the rest of this script.

Gioia: Jennifer Black
Jennifer: Suzanne Donaldson
Martin: Jonathan Holt
Ying: Sara Houghton
Madam Chan: Pik-Sen Lim
Thomas: Josef Pejchal
Uncle Chan: Ozzie Yue
Young Ying: Zakira Wong
Youmg Ah Chan: Jeff Peng
Young Madam Chan: Tong Li

Director: Muriel Romanes
Designer: Yoon-Jung Bae
Lighting: Chris Davey
Sound/Video: Mic Pool
Composer: Kim Ho Ip
Filming: John Nichol
Movement: Jane Howie
Voice/Dialect coach: Carol-Ann Crawford
Chinese language coach: May Yung
Calligrapher: Ting Yong Pan
Dramaturg: Nicola McCartney
Assistant director: Jemima Levick
Associate director: Stephen Wrentmore

2005-08-30 12:45:27