REVIEWS: NTS

20/8/06

© MARK FISHER published in Scotland on Sunday

REALISM

A characteristic quality of Brian McMaster's Edinburgh International Festival theatre programme over the last 15 years is its ability to split audiences. Every year, there's at least one love-it or hate-it show that provokes rows in foyers and letters to the editor. Often the split divides the fuddy-duddy reactionaries from the free-wheeling liberals. Sometimes there seems to be a north-south divide, the London critics fulminating at work that critics in Scotland embrace. Other times there's no rhyme or reason to it and, always, the fuss dies down as quickly as it blows up.

Controversy should not in itself be an artist's aim, but when it happens, it's actually a good sign. If people react strongly, there must be something worth reacting to. Knowing this, McMaster has often used his programme as a way of teasing the audience, confronting us with the idea that - to take three recent examples - it's possible to do Chekhov in modern dress, Eugene O'Neill at breakneck speed or Hamlet set in a piano bar. He sees it as the role of a festival to offer experiences that organisations more concerned with keeping their season-ticket holders happy would baulk at. After all, disliking a show can be as stimulating as loving it. If a show doesn't work, you can still enjoy figuring out why.

So in the first week of his final run around the block, McMaster has offered two shows which have their particular challenges and which have split audiences accordingly. The first, Anthony Neilson's Realism, takes us into a landscape of subconscious desires which many would rather he had kept repressed. The second, William Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida, directed by Peter Stein, is dark, cynical and subversive with none of the fast-paced action that excites audiences about plays such as Hamlet and Twelfth Night that he wrote in the same period. It's hard to imagine anyone feeling neutral towards either.

Roy Hattersley certainly didn't. The Labour peer was quoted in The Times this week saying how much he'd hated Realism. He is reported to have thought the show "pretentious nonsense" with very little to say. "It wanted to shock as an alternative to being creative," was his verdict. He will not be alone in his opinion, but to my mind his analysis is deeply flawed.

If the show shocked - and, hardened hack that I am, I can't say it shocked me - it's as a by-product of Anthony Neilson's creativity not as an alternative to it. If the director and playwright hadn't taken such a bold, creative leap in the dark, we would have nothing to be shocked by.

The play is a companion piece to the brilliant 2004 Festival show, The Wonderful World of Dissocia. Where that award-winning play explored the Alice in Wonderland dreamscape of someone going through the manic cycle of manic depression, Realism attempts to represent an equally vivid interior universe of someone we would say was mentally healthy. We find an excellent Stuart McQuarrie, playing a character of the same name, spending a boring Saturday moping about the house. He is hung over from the night before and hung up about chucking his girlfriend. He doesn't feel up to anything more than eating, drinking, sleeping and watching television.

Only the most foolhardy playwright would take such a mundane scenario as a premise for a 90-minute play but, by presenting it as a one-man show for seven actors in which every passing thought takes physical shape, Neilson reveals something of the highly colourful inner life we all experience even on the most dreary of days.

Of course, you might be offended to see graphic representations of impulses we normally keep quiet about. The reason we keep quiet about them is they're socially unacceptable, but that doesn't mean they don't exist. Neilson's bravery - quite the reverse of Hattersley's suggestion that he's only out to shock - is to be nakedly honest about the babble of fantasy, neurosis and childhood memories that accompanies his waking hours. Casting his own father, Sandy Neilson, in the role of McQuarrie's father indicates how far he is willing to go down the route of Freudian exposition.

You might find it distasteful to see a masturbatory fantasy in which McQuarrie's newly-ditched girlfriend (Louise Ludgate) has sex with his childhood sweetheart (Shauna Macdonald) while sitting on the toilet, but it is entirely consistent with the revelatory premise of the play. It's also very funny, not least when the lesbian lovers are interrupted by McQuarrie's mother (the excellent Jan Pearson) behaving inappropriately over the washing machine and ruining her son's pornographic fantasy. Yes, it's vulgar, yes, it's embarrassing but - Neilson seems to say - this is the kind of stuff that goes through people's heads every day.

Although the lesbian sex scene will draw most attention (as well as the song-and-dance number too rude to mention in a family newspaper), it would be a great disservice to Realism to imply it was all adolescent smuttiness. The world Neilson creates on Miriam Buether's beautiful open set, the household furniture sinking into a sea of sand, is expansive and inclusive.

There is white liberal racism (a reprise of the Black and White Minstrel Show), pretensions to grandeur (McQuarrie silencing the guests on Any Questions with a rant about smoking), childhood memories (the theme tune to Mary, Mungo and Midge), distant awareness of war (an air raid briefly shattering the peace), moments of guilt (the cruel abuse of a telesales operator who turns out to have suffered a seizure in his wheelchair) and the nagging voice of his wild-child self (Matthew Pidgeon with a 70s mullet and a Starsky and Hutch T-shirt). In other words, the whole range of thoughts that might go through anyone's head in a day.

To suggest that such fecundity is more shocking than creative is hopelessly to miss the point. Although Realism isn't the equal of the superlative Dissocia, it's still a thoroughly entertaining piece of work that deserves to be taken seriously.

The challenge involved in Troilus and Cressida is of a different nature. As far as I'm aware, it hasn't had a professional production in Scotland since Philip Prowse staged it at the Citizens in 1973. That's because it's a difficult play. Not only does a modern audience have to get up to speed with a vast number of unfamiliar characters from Greek and Trojan history, but also it has to adjust to a play that values rhetoric over action, with lots of philosophical speeches about the merits of war and a worldview that is unremittingly bleak.

Without the Festival it might be another quarter century before we get to see the play again and, although Peter Stein is almost too well tuned in to Shakespeare's mood of autumnal cynicism, he comes up with several moments of sensual beauty. We see it in the erotic liaison between Henry Pettigrew's boyish Troilus and Annabel Scholey's worldly-wise Cressida; in the playful romping of Rachel Pickup's Helen on a seductive bed of crimson silks; and in the muscular parading of the bronzed soldiers in their tiny silver skirts. Personally, I found Stein's stately pace heavy going, as if the audience is expected to become as jaded as the ancient Greek elders, but there's no question the enterprise was a risk worth taking.

Realism, Royal Lyceum, run ended; Troilus and Cressida, King's Theatre, until August 26

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