Mr Bolfry
Mr Bolfry
Pitlochry Festival Theatre
Neil Cooper
A giant crucifix flanked by the Ten Commandments is the gambit of director Patrick Sandford's wryly observed and all too rare revival of James Bridie's Second World War philosophical inquiry
nto good and evil in a Wee Free Highland manse.
If this sounds like a wilfully portentious statement, once the two squaddies stationed there, Cohen and Cully, hook up with the minister McCrimmon's flighty niece Jean and embark on a game that conjures up the Devil himself, the play more resembles a fantastical TV show peopled by sophisticated demons who spout long-winded monologues in pursuit of the souls of the youthful and equally articulate gang tasked to thwart them.
If Bridie unwittingly penned an admittedly hokey template for Buffy, Charmed, et al, Sandford's production remains rooted in the era in which it was written. Dougal Lee's smooth-talking Mr Bolfry breezes into the manse's Sunday night austerity and offers up a litany on the transcendent powers and pleasures of art and life beyond old-time religion.
By the time Bolfry has taken flight, with Greg Powrie's McCrimmon in hot pursuit, the doors of perception have opened up for all.
For all the play's lofty moral aspirations, all aboard Sandford's production are having great fun with it, adding levity to what could be rendered as an overly verbose affair.
Lee by turns spars and flirts with his gathered congregation, with Karen Fishwick's Jean clearly a free spirit in waiting, while Kirsty MacLaren's maid, Morag, is already spellbound. As all discover that the pleasures of the flesh maybe aren't so sinful after all, the assorted clinches they get into suggests happy-ever-afters have been corrupted forever more.
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