The Stage

Tilt - Broke/Distracted/White Point

Published Wednesday 15 November 2006 at 17:10 by Thom Dibdin

Riddled with great ideas and boasting a succession of excellent performances, this triple bill of new plays is a return to form for the Traverse theatre.

Playing in rep over the length of November’s Cubed season of work, the only element which the three plays have in common is their off-kilter look at the world. The productions are given a certain sense of coherence by sharing a creative team, enhanced by Lisa Sangster who succeeds in using cubes as the central device in her design for all three.

In Broke, by French playwright David Lescot in a version by Iain F MacLeod, David Ireland plays an unnamed man who has been made bankrupt. His wife has left him but society has gifted him a new chance to succeed, thanks to his Designated Liquidator (Garry Collins), who will sell all his belongings and discharge all his debts.

It is bleak stuff, very French in its characterisation, in which the man shrinks into his own world as his ego shrinks from the loss of all his dignity. Collins’ aloof detachment is in direct contrast to Ireland’s sense of dislocation. Abigail Davies is little used but very well judged as the man’s unsympathetic wife. DJRed6’s soundtrack enhances the emptiness of the man’s existence.

Distracted, by Morna Pearson, is the most successful of the three, even though the north east Scotland accents are too sketchy for comfort. Set in a caravan park for society’s lost causes, Garry Collins plays Jamie, a boy who is coping with the loss of his drug-dependent mother and the inappropriate attentions of Bunny, mother of the boy in the next door caravan.

There is a real horror about this as the truths emerge about Jamie and his Granny, played by Anne Lacey in her only appearance in the three plays. You are never quite sure where you are in reality, while Ireland as George-Michael, the boy next door, and Davies as the over-sexualised Bunny help create the tapestry of despair.

White Point sees Davies take the central role of Lesley a woman who has affairs with two very different men - Ireland’s dependable Graeme and Collins’ art-student free-wheeler, Robert. David Priestley has a strong sense for realistic dialogue, which the three are absolutely equal to bringing to the stage in all the cringe-making truth of first kisses and opening declarations of love.

An attempt to mix the time-frames of the two relationships is much less successful. Instead of giving a sense of contrast between the two relationships and their eventual endings, it creates a bewildering confusion as to what exactly is going on. It is a twist that takes over the plot and becomes its subject.

Overall, Tilt contains the sort of exciting and challenging theatre that has slowly disappeared from the Traverse over the last few years. Gone is the stultifying anxiety to succeed, replaced by the sort of freshness that indicates that the Traverse is still very much a contender for its claim to be Scotland’s new writing theatre.

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