Out of the blues BLUE/ORANGE PAISLEY ARTS CENTRE, RUN ENDED; TOURING

THERE are more than a few shades of David Mamet's scintillating Oleanna in Joe Penhall's award-winning play from 2000, Blue/Orange. Penhall enjoyed recent success with his screenplay for the excellent film version of Ian McEwan's novel Enduring Love, and, like McEwan and Mamet, has a real talent for intensity.

The drama, which is currently receiving its Scottish premiere, courtesy of the ever-ambitious Rapture theatre company, is set in a contemporary psychiatric hospital. The piece plays through the triangular relationship between Christopher, a young black man on the verge of being released, having been "sectioned" for 28 days, and his doctors, trainee Bruce and senior consultant Robert.

Although Penhall's play is a three-hander, as opposed to the headto-head confrontation of Mamet's tragedy of institutional power and distorted gender politics, the similarities are striking. Like Oleanna, Blue/Orange engages with a powerfully contentious socio- political subject (namely, the disproportionate number of black men diagnosed with serious mental health conditions within the UK). Like Mamet's play, it shows how matters of oppression, ambition and personal animus can combine with power relations in the workplace to devastating effect.

Director Michael Emans has assembled a top class cast of Christopher John Hall (Christopher), Greg Powrie (Bruce) and Jimmy Chisholm (Robert), which gives enthralling expression to the complexities of Penhall's script.

Hall, in particular, is superb as the understandably agitated young man who finds himself caught in the ideological and professional conflicts between the doctors.

Designer Lyn McAndrew's overthe-top and jagged metallic set looks like something from Dr Who. This accomplished and otherwise measured production could perhaps do without the heavy-handed symbolism.

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