IN THE exquisite balancing act required from the Pitlochry “Stay Six Days, See Six Plays” season, it is no surprise the works of Alan Ayckbourn crop up regularly. They have just the right mixture of frivolity and seriousness; easy digestibility and thought-provoking roughage.
Things We Do For Love is the one with the three levels of one house on view simultaneously.
The main stage is the ground floor, where Barbara lives in spinsterish seclusion. Below is the basement where the head of Gilbert, the postman who carries a slightly weird torch for her, can occasionally be seen painting the ceiling. Above is the flat with Nikki, Barbara’s dizzy old school friend and her fiancé Hamish. It must be one of the few plays where actors are required to act only from the knee down.
All of this is expertly realised in Ken Harrison’s set. However, playing the emotionally complex subtexts is not easy. The key moment in this play, when Hamish and Barbara, who apparently loathe each other, suddenly realise they fancy each other, has to ring true. But Jacqueline Dutoit’s Barbara is too histrionic to be convincing as a pressure cooker of pent-up lust. Less would be a lot more, and despite convincing performances from the rest of the cast, the play is fatally wounded.
Christopher Sergel’s adaptation of Harper Lee’s classic novel is less demanding in that sense, and here the large Pitlochry company comes into its own, peopling the town of Maycombe and filling the courthouse on Adrian Rees’s handsome sets for the trial of the falsely accused negro, Tom Robinson. What is lost, is the book’s child’s-eye view of the injustices of the adult world.
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Nevertheless, the tall, deep-voiced Jonathan Coote rises to the occasion as Atticus with great dignity. The final, fatal intervention of Boo Radley is sufficiently well handled for Lee’s famous sign off about there only being one kind of folks, and that’s folks, to ring as true as ever.
Although Lee set her story in 1935, she wrote it in the late 1950s, just a few years before Edgar Ray Killen ordered the slaughter of three civil rights workers; a crime for which he was finally convicted last week.
The coincidental timing certainly reinforces Mockingbird’s urgent and timeless plea for common understanding.
Both in rep until Oct 22; box office 01796-484626