The rumour around the stage door of the Tron was that the production budget for this show, the actual spending money beyond what comes with the theatre, was precisely £60. It probably was not what a writer with a reputation as big as Neil LaBute would have expected for the European premiere of one of his most recent published works.
But fair play to Theatre Jezebel for persuading LaBute to give them the rights and to the designer and co-director Kenny Miller, who does so much with a few tea lights, some toy cars and a couple of Christmas decorations.
All 12 actors here in LaBute’s six playlets — connected only by all being set in the front seat of a car — wear black and yet all look completely different. The stage is black, the three sets of twin chairs are black. The rows of candles become the white lines in the middle of the highway, the toys are the other traffic. There is no sign of literal visual clues such as steering wheels or car seats (even though the first sketch is actually called Bench Seat).
Miller, the true inheritor of the Glasgow Citizens in its flamboyant heyday, is a visionary stylist who can make something dark and stylish out of almost nothing.
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And yet, as it so often was at the Citizens, it would be a mistake to be seduced merely by Miller’s sense of the theatrical. Not only does LaBute’s writing, as ever, pack a deceptive punch, each impeccably written section reveals an ever more complex and uncomfortable back story with almost every word.
But Miller and his co-director Mary McCluskey have also imposed some radical touches of their own. Who else would have thought to reverse the gender polarity in Road Trip so that the predatory abductor is a woman and the abductee is a teenage boy?
Just as you wonder why the show, which is steeped in Americana, is not called Freeway or Interstate, along come the disappointed adoptive parents in the final playlet, also called Autobahn, praising the lack of limits on the German road system and offering the statistic that Americans spend one eighth of their lives in their cars.
Twelve very decent performances, (including the men who in most of them have literally nothing to say) allied to writing and staging of this quality, all add up to something of a coup for the Tron.
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