Theatre
IF ONLY . . . Royal Lyceum Theatre. Edinburgh. until Sat 12 Apr 0000
There’s always a lot of talk about the need to represent working class characters on stage, but usually the reality is the creation of a freakshow of criminality, psychopathy and drug addiction. In effect, it becomes the assuaging of the average middle class audience's guilt, showing the working class folk as distant objects of fear or condescension. The beauty of Bill Findlay and Martin Bowman’s translation of this latest of Michel Tremblay‘s many successful Scottish debuts is its completely unpatronising and unsensational representation of a working class mother.
In it, a writer (Peter Kelly) speaks to us of the endless theatrical classics, from Electra, to Hamlet, to Streetcar and beyond, assuring us that the story he will tell is none of these. Yet, the tale of this ordinary woman of estate-land becomes all of them. We‘re shifted into two talk show chairs, as the writer recreates a succession of memories of his bustling raconteur
of a mother (Eileen McCallum) who died as he entered manhood. From an early chastisement of a ten-year-old prankster, to a final honest conversation with the shadow of death hanging over her, a succession of memories recreates a woman of humour. strength and tenderness.
The wonderful, bouncing Scots translation of Findlay and Bowman creates a succession of earthy rhythms which McCallum plays flawlessly, bringing back particular memories of the mother figure in Tremblay‘s The Guid Sisters. Muriel Romanes directs with real assurance, while if Saul Radomsky‘s set might seem gratuitously frugal at first, you must wait until the final deus ex machina, which I'm loathe to reveal here.
If the first couple of scenes feel a little stumbly, stay with this show: it's a slow burner with a strong emotional pay off. The sense of a fully created character in McCallum's performance is such that she might reach out of the lights and touch you with a fully fleshed hand, while Kelly plays a nice understated host. Under all of the badinage of everyday chat, a vast emotional subtext speaks of the biographical roots of this piece. (Steve Cramer)
Eileen McCallum: mummy becomes Electra
filthy QUEEN or scors cor HER HEAD CHOPPED OFF Touring COO
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