Adam Smith Centre, Kirkcaldy
3 stars
When Hector MacMillan's play about religious bigotry in a Glasgow
tenement first appeared in 1973, hand-me-down sectarianism was rife.
Forty years on, that same bigotry still blights the west coast of
Scotland, and Bill MacWilliam, the staunchest of unreconstructed
Orange-men who the play pivots around, is as recognisable as ever in
Michael Emans' Rapture Theatre production.
Set on the morning of the annual July 12th parade, widowed Bill and his
grown-up son Cameron are suffering. Cameron has looked beyond the
blinkers of what he's been taught, and is refusing to march, even if
his girlfriend Georgina sides with his father. With Bill at war with
Catholic downstairs neighbour Bridget and her pregnant daughter Una, it
takes a drink-fuelled accident for anything like reconciliation to take
place.
While MacMillan's play starts off comic, it's saying some deeply
serious things, not just about bigotry, but about how belief systems
provide an emotional crutch to many. Bill and Cameron are clearly still
in mourning, but both are too macho to admit it. There's something
going on too concerning the generational rift the ideas of the 1960s
opened up.
If Emans' brush-strokes are too broad to begin with, it's a mere sucker
punch for the ideological debates that follow. Stewart Porter makes for
an unusually vulnerable-looking Bill, with Colin Little's Cameron the
only fully rounded character on show. As Ashley Smith's Una educates
Cameron, her songs from both sides of the divide become the play's
conscience. As she says, “There's a great spirit to them all.” As for
Bill, like the organisation he puts faith in, he may be the walking
wounded, but remains too stubborn to surrender.
The Herald, May 1st 2013
ends
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