Theatre
The Devil Masters, Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh
Three stars
It's Christmas Eve in Edinburgh New Town, and in the ornate interior of legal power couple Cameron and Lara's Georgian des-res, the fire is roaring, the wine is uncorked and their beloved dog Max is frolicking in the garden. Set to a classical music soundtrack, the scene is almost too perfect in Orla O'Loughlin's production of Iain Finlay Macleod's new play, as if lifted from the pages of some high society magazine.
Enter John, an intruder from the opposite end of the social spectrum, whose rude intrusion and kidnap of Max sees the veneer of respectability rapidly unravel, and Lara at least show her true colours.
The name of the game is survival, as John first becomes trapped, only to use his animal mentality to turn the tables on his captors. As played by John Bett and Barbara Rafferty as Cameron and Lara, and Keith Fleming as John, the heightened grotesquerie in the cartoon class war that follows resembles the sort of treatment Mike Leigh might give his subjects. John in particular is cut from much the same cloth as the film-maker's underclass anti-hero Johnny in Naked.
As increasingly absurd as things become in the play's comically cutting dissection of snobbery, prejudice and just how divided a city Scotland's capital can be sometimes, to fully hit home it could be even more manic and even more savage in its delivery. Despite this, the local references from Irvine Welsh to Jack Vettriano which are peppered throughout Macleod's script provoked instant recognition from the first-night audience in this enlightened tale of two cities occupying the same urban jungle.
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