Theatre
Broth, Oran Mor, Glasgow
Mary Brennan
TWO STARS
Easter Monday - and the lunchtime play is a curate's egg. Drunkard Jimmy (Ron Donachie) is a hard man on the streets, and an even more volatile and aggressive bully at home - and that's not tomato sauce he's spilled on the kitchen table-cloth. Long-suffering wife, Mary (Kay Gallie), has - like the chicken stock she's making - reached boiling point, and clocked him with the kettle. Now, she's calmly sitting down, resolutely impervious while daughter Sheena (Molly Innes) and grand-daughter Ally (Kirsty MacKay) squawk about like shrill hens - more unstitched by her lack of concern, than by the apparent corpse slumped on the table.
In the interests of hard-pressed comedy and plot-lines, you can't, however, keep a good baddie down. While Mary muses wistfully on other faiths that give you a "second chance" after death, Jimmy unexpectedly revives. It's a high-point, with Donachie barreling into full, frothing Vesuvial mode. His tirade is one of the few points when writer Tim Primrose's tedious reliance on re-iterative text (larded with the "f-word" as a marker of this family's linguistic impoverishment) conveys character - and that's really thanks to Donachie, all baleful glares and scatter-gun spleen.
Gallie, meanwhile, has conveyed a life-time of abuse and family dysfunction, through her soft-voiced delivery (even of the inevitable oaths) and air of habitual self-containment. Even Vincent Friell, in his cameo as Jimmy's garrulous pal, Patch, has a much better time of it than Innes and MacKay who are saddled with roles that start off in high-pitched hysteria, before descending into repeated panics. Themes of domestic abuse, the legacy that violence visits on families, the nature of repentance and forgiveness all scramble together here - but despite some unstinting performances, it's hard to care about, let alone believe in, any of it.
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