Theatre
Yer Granny
King's Theatre, Glasgow
Neil Cooper
Four stars
Douglas Maxwell's scurrilous West Coast of Scotland version of Argentinian writer Roberto Cossa's piece of comic outrage, La Nona, could have been tailor-made for popular fun palaces like the King's. There's something about the 1970s setting, the Glam Rock pre-show music and the even louder wallpaper of designer Colin Richmond's garish living room set in Graham McLaren's National Theatre of Scotland production that reeks of an unreconstructed music hall turn writ large, loud and at times very dirty indeed.
Yet there's revolutionary intent too in this tale of a small town chip shop owning family caught in the midst of the pre Thatcher recession and up against a shiny new burger bar as the Queen's 1977 Silver Jubilee looks set to tame the masses. Jonathan Watson's patriarch Cammy even riffs on an imaginary conversation with HRH in-between defending his couch potato would-be genius brother Charlie to his soon to be emancipated wife Marie. Daughter Marissa, meanwhile, turns her prim Aunt Angela into an accidental hit woman as all the while the over-riding presence of the play's eponymous Granny devours everything in sight.
All of which looks and sounds as if Shameless or Mrs Brown's Boys had been hi-jacked by Dario Fo and given a right good seeing to. Playing to a packed house, Gregor Fisher as Granny lumbers guilelessly and grotesquely around the stage like a constipated rhino on heat in McLaren's audacious and explosive production. Barbara Rafferty is a blast as a pilled-up and increasingly manic Aunt Angela, with Brian Pettifer's crumbling but perennially randy octogenarian Donnie Francisco even more so in a piece of serious fun that looks at extreme reactions in the face of all encroaching greed.
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