DRAMATISTS should think hard before composing such lines as “Oh, it’s so peaceful here, I’m so relaxed I could fall asleep”, as David Harrower does at a particularly bland point in Dark Earth. They risk provoking a consensual snore from you and me in the audience. Sad to say, there were moments during Harrower’s new play when I wondered if the Traverse shouldn’t be handing out pep pills or matchsticks with the programme.
As witness Knives in Hens, the piece that made his name in 1995, Harrower specialises in rather quiet plays about narrow lives in the depths of rural Scotland. But “quiet” can and should mean interesting, loaded, intense, resonant. And with a young Glaswegian couple stuck in the outback when their car breaks down, the local garage seemingly unable to trace them, and help and hospitality offered by a passing farmer and his wife, there’s reason to hope that the play will earn those adjectives. Doesn’t its title have an ominous, dramatic ring? But for most of Philip Howard’s production the piece remains so low-key, low-energy and lacking in tension that you yearn for something to shake its cage, like the Second Coming or at least the arrival of Scotland’s equivalent of the Hound of the Baskervilles.
The car driver, John Mackay’s Euan, is going through an uneasy time with his partner, Frances Grey’s Valerie, and tries to pinch a guidebook from his host and hostess, thus alienating their daughter, Suzanne Donaldson’s blunt, brusque Christine. And it gradually becomes clear that her parents, Jimmy Yuill’s lugubriously humorous Petey and Anne Lacey’s mildly harried Ida, may have to sell their farmhouse to meet their debts. Big deal.
Yet this could indeed be a big deal with strong writing and acting. As it is, relatively minor rows ripple this way and that, and the talk turns to history and heritage. Bonnie Prince Charlie passed here en route south. The Romans built their turf-and-timber Antonine Wall near by. But you never seriously feel what you presumably should: that “dark earth” infuses the veins, minds and hearts of farming people who have already lost just about all the fields that actually contain it.
The dramatic temperature lifts a bit at the end. Suddenly Petey, Ida and disaffected Christine begin to resemble the embattled, hostile characters of John Whiting’s archetypal study of family paranoia, Saint’s Day. But that’s unearned, poorly motivated and none too credible.
Advertisement
After Henry Adam’s The People Next Door, the funny, touching play that launched the Traverse’s festival the night before, Dark Earth is quite a downer.
Box office: 0131-228 1404