Empty, no.8


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Empty set no.8

Image by angus mcdiarmid

An extremely naturalistic set for a very unnaturalistic play.

The Guardian review:
HERBAL REMEDIES
The Arches, Glasgow

James Kelman is back on stage and not before time. Give or take the odd Fringe offering, the Booker prize-winner is best known in the theatre for Hardie and Baird, a wordy historical drama about two unsung Scottish radicals, which was staged by Edinburgh's Traverse as long ago as 1990. What a shame that a novelist with such an acute ear for the patterns of colloquial speech should have been absent from the theatre for so long. Happily, Andy Arnold's Arches company has discovered a backlog of unproduced plays and is staging a two-part mini-season, starting with this, an amusing park-bench comedy that makes up in west coast of Scotland patter what it lacks in dramatic weight.

Imagine if Davies from Harold Pinter's Caretaker had wandered on to the set of Waiting for Godot and found himself part of a surreal music-hall double act. Two tramps, one barefoot, the other one-legged, pass the time beneath a leafless tree in a park where a woman sleeps off a hangover. There are shades of the existentialist debate of those earlier plays, but in place of bleakness, Kelman opts for comic indecision. "I'm not a religious man," says one of the men with an air of finality. "But at the same time I'm not an atheist."

Like most of the play, it gets a laugh, thanks in no small part to the two lovingly realised performances of Laurie Ventry, gap-toothed and dishevelled, and David McKay, who steadfastly refuses to see anything funny about his condition. The main joke is how far they will warp their logic in order to agree with each other. "Sometimes everything is significant," says McKay portentously, only to draw the line at Ventry's suggestion that a falling leaf might be meaningful.

Although not a major play, to call it an extended sketch would be to under-rate it. Kelman's theme is about the values of the dispossessed, showing us men who have so little that even food and shoes are luxuries. However, they yearn for emotional completeness. Even though they settle for Andrea Gibb's Clarissa, a sharp-tongued derelict who denies them sex or even cuddles, she is a woman and a signifier of a kind of happy ending.









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