Assembly Hall, Edinburgh
Three stars
Winners and losers are everywhere in Johnny McKnight
and Anita Vettesse’s new play with songs for a co-production between Grid Iron and
Stellar Quines theatre companies. It’s bingo night, and hopes are high for the
regulars who flock to the local Mecca. Desperate thirty-something Daniella
especially has her fingers crossed after a financial mess of her own making
looks set to catch up with her. With her hatchet-faced mother Mary and her best
pal Ruth in tow, it’s eyes down for an all or nothing game to end them all.
As it stands, Jemima Levick’s loose-knit production tugs
in so many directions it’s as if those creating it got bored with their own
initial idea and decided to ramp things up to preposterous proportions in order
to make things more interesting. One minute it’s a girls’ night out style
feel-good romp; the next it’s a turbo-charged fantastical sit-com, barely based
in reality and peppered with potty-mouthed one-liners, pink-stetsoned stand-offs
and smatterings of high and low campery.
A cast led by a heroic Louise McCarthy as Daniella
give it their all, but amidst the appealing kitsch of Alan Penman’s show-tunes
and a serious message about financial hardship in working-class communities,
there is much here that is surplus to requirements. Barbara Rafferty’s Henry the
Hoover wielding Joanna, for instance, appears to have wandered in from another
show, and indeed merits one all of her own.
There’s a mighty fine play in here somewhere, but it
needs a heap of work to chisel away the excess baggage it’s currently saddled
with before it can fully connect. While there is much to enjoy on a surface
level, at the moment it feels like a first draft work-in-progress for something
bigger, brasher and brighter yet to come.
The Herald, March 12th 2018
ends
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