Gregory Burke’s precise ear for the vernacular of small town Fife cuts right through his new four-hander. Under Jimmy Fay’s direction, this is take no prisoners stuff, an hilarious, bitter and very dark telling of the night before what should have been Andy’s wedding, but will now be his funeral.
It doesn’t quite hit its stride straight away. As bereaved fiance Vicky (Lisa Gardner) catches up with her returning younger sister Nikki (Catherine Murray), the words and actions are all there, but Murray is too stiff to convince. Although the subtle relationships between the two are well teased out.
Stiffness of a completely different and deliberate kind appears with the arrival of Andy’s best friend Stevie (Michael Moreland) and their old pal Tony (Andy Clark). The pace and meaning of what can, and can’t, be said - with the corpse in the room - is hilariously observed.
The reassuring rhythm of familiar cliches is background to the previous - and current - relationships between the four.
A billboard-size monochrome reproduction of Titian’s Three Ages of Man separates Vicky and Andy’s sitting room from their upstairs bedroom on Connor Murphy’s revolving set. The meaning is clear, as sex, drugs and rolling banter come between the middle-aging men and the younger women.
There’s not quite as much going on here as Burke might like us to believe and he certainly doesn’t add anything new to our perceptions of modern life. That’s not the point, though. Ribald, amoral and unpretentious, this is theatre which should be playing to huge, popular audiences.
Production information can change over the run of the show.
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