Citizens Theatre, Glasgow 4 stars There’s something of the Wild West in Martin Travers’ brutally intense play that is the flagship production of the National Theatre of Scotland’s Reveal 2012 season of new work. It’s not just the long leather coats and customised bowler hats that give Amanda Gaughan’s production the sort of rough-shod stylistic trappings that Sam Pekinpah would be proud of. As the play’s quartet of transients seek sanctuary in the gloom beneath a crossing they’re seemingly destined not to make, it’s the sense of a frontier lost to things not of their own making that gives it such a widescreen feel. All the more remarkable, then, that Travers has set his brooding tale of bargains made and secrets spilled in rural Lanarkshire in what he calls ‘another Scotland’. It’s a place where the brave new world that was promised presumably never happened, and where Ryan Fletcher’s ruthless Robert John and John Kielty’s more humane Andrew live off scraps in-between
An archive of arts writing by Neil Cooper. Effete No Obstacle.