A DEAD man’s ghost and a comatose man’s spirit looking at a man swathed in bandages: when the subject is Ulster, the image creates certain expectations. But Kings of the Road approaches the Province and its woes from an odd angle. Here’s a bus driver’s-eye view of both.
Brian McAvera’s appealing, nicely acted play at the Pleasance also owes much to the Irish tradition of nostalgic memory-plays and, particularly, plays about filial pain. The silent figure in the hospital bed is Michael Smiley’s T.J. Sharvin. As he says when he briefly steps out of his body, he’s not Catholic nor Protestant, “only a busman”, but that hasn’t stopped him being ravaged in a terrorist attack. And he’s now just an excuse for Ed Byrne as his bus driver son and James Ellis as the spectre of his ex-bus driver father to indulge in reminiscence and anecdote. The result isn’t quite the hard-hitting comedy one had hoped. But together three generations of the Sharvin dynasty recreate a quirky world peopled by “characters” such as Killer McArdle, who murdered bus-engines with his incompetence and so became a driving instructor, and Mad Dog McAvity, who was carpeted for causing near-accidents by avoiding dogs and obediently squashed a pedigree dachshund. Oh, and what’s the answer to “how long will the next bus be?” “As long as this one”, that’s what.
Richard Dormer’s Hurricane (at the Assembly Rooms), which opens in Ulster, has far more punch even though it barely touches on politics. But that’s unsurprising, since the title refers to Alex Higgins, who whooshed through Britain’s snooker halls, only to end up felling himself. Myself, I’m not too interested in the game and recall the man only as a tearful figure clutching his small child as he was acclaimed world champion — yet I left the theatre knowing I’d seen a terrific solo show.
A cliché story — precociously gifted childhood to triumph to “birds, booze and bust-ups” — is transformed by the economy of the writing and the hyperactive brilliance of Dormer’s acting. He looks like Higgins, and writhes, squints, twitches as he evokes his mannerisms, down to the hoarse croak of raddled, cancerous age. But he can also cartwheel with joy, dancing across a stage shaped like a snooker table, then fall apart as self-pity, paranoia and impotent rage set in and the stage fills with wasted money, beer cans, cigarette packets and other Hurricane-blown debris. I can’t recall a more physically devastating portrait of self-destruction.
Back in the Pleasance, Chris O’Connell’s Kid is the third in Theatre Absolute’s trilogy of tough street plays, and those who admired Car and Raw should respond to its tale of a criminal husband battling to go straight. The piece isn’t well plotted or motivated, but it’s finely acted, notably by Richard Oldham: feral, grisly and scarily larky all at once.
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Pleasance 0131-556 6550; Assembly Rooms 0131-226 2428