Black comedy

Six black candlesRoyal Lyceum Theatre, EdinburghUntil april 3 4/5 stars Sauchiehall STreetTolbooth, StirlingRun ended, touring until april 33/5 stars What a difference a play makes! When award-winning novelist and short-story writer Des Dillon's well-intentioned, but dreary, political drama Lockerbie 103 took to the stage a year ago, the most common response was that he would have been better sticking to prose fiction. With Six Black Candles, however, the Coatbridge- raised author has found his theatrical niche.

Dillon is famously proud of his working-class roots, and his story of Caroline (who has been abandoned by her philandering husband, Bobby, and is facing the repossession of her flat), her five sisters, her mother and her granny, is alive with caricature of the most convincing and hilarious kind.

Bent on the twin objectives of revenge against the teenage babysitter who has been having it away with Caroline's man and extracting the mortgage money out of the double-dealing Bobby, the women mix and match their belief systems with stupendous alacrity.

Inspired by their foul-mouthed, heavy-drinking, chapel-devoted Irish granny (a fabulous Eileen McCallum), a combination of the occult and hired thuggery is employed.

No sooner have the eponymous black candles been laid out on the living room carpet, however, than the new parish priest (played outrageously well by Mark McDonnell) arrives to console the jilted wife. The ensuing scene is as hilarious a combination of bawdy humour, slapstick and sheer irreverence as you are likely to see on a stage; imagine, if you will, a working-class, west of Scotland Carry On film with a satirical edge.

There are few flaws in Mark Thomson's beautifully crafted production. Only a pedant would complain that Coatbridge is unlikely to have branches of the fashionable Edinburgh convenience store, plastic bags from which appear regularly on stage. The pace lags a little in the first half, but this minor blemish is overcome entirely by the tremendous ensemble acting and an outstanding gag about where Bobby has put Caroline's money.

If Dillon's comic drama is a pleasant surprise, the latest play by Iain Heggie, author of the wonderful Wiping My Mother's Arse, is a definite disappointment. Even allowing for life imitating art (I watched this pastiche of Scottish theatre in a near-empty Tolbooth in Stirling), there are holes in both Heggie's script and director Matthew Lenton's production that you could drive a truckload of damning reviews through.

Set in the office of Glasgow actors' agent Dorothy (a selfish viper who lies constantly through her Kelvinside vowels), the play is yet further evidence that playwrights are rarely at their best when writing about the theatre itself. In stark contrast to the affectionate humour of Dillon's drama, Sauchiehall Street seems mired in the bitterness of disappointment, and consequently much of its comedy turns sour.

On his day, Heggie is a master of humanistic-yet-scabrous satire, but there's an unpleasant derision about Scotland's theatre here, like an aggrieved drunk leaving the pub cursing all and sundry. If Scotland's national disease is parochialism, the play merely heightens this sense of provincialism in its attempt to send it up.

Nevertheless, in the midst of the dreary in-jokes and surprisingly predictable gags, there is just enough of Heggie's trademark comic vulgarity, and enough fine acting (not least from Jo Cameron Brown as Dorothy, and Peter Kelly as her actor husband Gerard), to save this presentation from descending into out-and-out cartoonism.

Copyright 2004 SMG Sunday Newspapers Ltd.
Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning Company. All rights Reserved.