There's something of the Wild West in Martin Travers' brutally intense play that is the flagship production of the National Theatre of Scotland's Reveal 2012 season of new work.
It's not just the long leather coats and bowler hats that give Amanda Gaughan's production the sort of stylings of which Sam Peckinpah would have been proud. As a quartet of transients seeks sanctuary beneath a bridge they're seemingly destined not to cross, it's the sense of a frontier lost to things not of their own making that gives the piece such a cinematic feel.
All the more remarkable, then, that Travers has set his brooding tale of deals made and secrets spilled in rural Lanarkshire in what he calls "another Scotland". It's a place where the brave new world that was promised presumably never happened, and where Ryan Fletcher's ruthless Robert John and John Kielty's humane Andrew live off scraps while burning the corpses of the plague victims that surround them.
The bridge may be their fortress, but it's also a natural beacon for Helen Mallon's whey-faced Catherine and her guardian, Craw, played with raggedy guile by Myra McFadyen. When both Craw and Catherine's baby are afflicted, it forces the mother into acts that may help her survive, but which will have long-term consequences for all.
The language is an arcane mix of flamboyant richness with something unflinchingly coarse. In the grit of a rarely heard demotic that punctuates the play, a major new voice might just have been heard.
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