An inspired idea pays off with three new plays

Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh

IT is an inspired idea, having young drama students on the verge of going out into the world of work with seasoned professional playwrights to develop new works that stretch the talents of all involved. So it is with the three new short plays by Clare Duffy, Jo Clifford and Isabel Wright, performed and directed as a series of double bills by the graduates of the Royal Conservatoire Scotland's MA classical and contemporary text course with support from Playwrights' Studio Scotland.

Clare Duffy's 1914 Machine starts off looking like a Girl's Own adventure yarn, as female spy La Marquise flies across the English Channel to deliver secret war plans to the government and ends up lurching into a science-fiction future in which everyone communicates through screens. In between, La Marquise flies high with a pre-war bohemian set for whom she supplies cocaine and some stolen radium that might just hold the key to the future.

As the drugs loosen lips and minds, in director Paul Brotherston's hands the hyper-active rubbish spouted by all resembles a sub-Chekhovian student party which his cast grab at with suitable abandon. By leaping time-zones, Duffy creates a timely meditation on the ever-encroaching pervasiveness of technology that looks to E M Forster's short story The Machine Stops in a lively joining of the dots between past, present and future.

Even more playful is Jo Clifford's White Ted And The Right To Die, which looks at the whys and wherefores of euthanasia in a day-to-day environment. That Clifford does this through a teddy-bear narrator and a dog called Benji who returns as a ghost after being put down adds a humorous heart to a very serious subject.

There is too the conflicted views of the same person represented here by two actors in Jessica Aquila Cymerman's production, which starts off with the cast in overalls as if checking a crime scene for forensic evidence before revealing themselves. With some neat shadow-play, there is an appealing warmth invested into a life-and-death situation that is much more than a shaggy dog story.

Where Duffy and Clifford offered up fantastical world-views, Blind Eye by Isabel Wright looks to an all-too-contemporary scenario of spin for inspiration. As a politician and his wife turn to the ultimate PR firm to give them a boost, an activist infiltrates the company as an intern in league with a reporter who takes an even more gung-ho approach to exposing scandals both political and sexual. Out of this comes a political thriller that looks at how lies are dressed up by managerial sleights-of-hand that can and do turn every misdemeanour into a positive.

In Wendy Turner's production, Wright's series of short scenes flow into each other with a full sense of deal-making intrigue before chaos reigns as all are exposed. The end result is a dramatically stark and healthily cynical look at how the world is being run right now behind doors which, for most of us, remain very firmly closed.