smart comedy still packs a Punch

reviewed gagarin way dundee rep run ended: tours scotland until october 5HHHHH Rarely, if ever, does a major hit from the Edinburgh Festival Fringe punch enough weight to graduate into the heavyweight division beyond. Gregory Burke's Gagarin Way was 2001's runaway success, collecting the Scotsman's First Of The Firsts award for the green room mantelpiece. And now - the flattery of comparison with more lightweight Fringe fare having been removed - it still packs one hell of a punch.

The swagger in its step is unmistakable. Opening with a discussion of Sartre shows an audacity more experienced playwrights would shrink from, but Burke carries it off with a light touch. Rather than drowning the audience in terminology, he succeeds in making that terminology impossibly funny. Throughout the play, he deftly juggles complex philosophical precepts with rough character comedy while raising the tension like a thriller.

The play has a simple premise. Gary and Eddie plan to kidnap one of the fatcats who run their factory, explain to him the error of his ways, then shoot him: political violence for the anti-globalisation movement. Unfortunately Tom, the security guard who let them in for (pounds) 200 on the understanding that they're stealing computer chips, comes back to collect his hat: "They make you pay for a new one". As the evening progresses, things go wronger and wronger and get nastier and nastier.

Michael Moreland, as Tom, acts a wonderful comic counterpoint to the violence and idealism of the other two - not that Gary and Eddie are your archetypal anti-globalisation campaigners. Billy McElhaney plays Gary, a Leninist in a ludicrous leather coat, with a mixture of injured pride and the rabbit-in-the-headlights look of a man out of his league.

Eddie is a borderline psycho with little interest in political point-scoring. Paul Thomas Hickey doesn't quite give him the latent brutality Michael Nardone had in the original cast - he rests more comfortably on the comedy in the part. But it will take more than that to make this jostling, muscular play look lightweight.

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