The Driver's Seat

Seen at Royal Lyceum, Edinburgh

Transferring to Tramway, Glasgow,

July 2-4

Reviewed by Mark Brown

Muriel Spark's intense "whydunnit" The Driver's Seat is a fascinating choice for stage adaptation by the National Theatre of Scotland's artistic director Laurie Sansom. Published in 1970, this short experimental thriller about Lise, an alienated, lonely and deeply distressed office worker with a death wish, could be read as a disturbing concession to violent, male psycho-sexual fantasies.

However, that would be to reckon without the sophistication and reverberating ambiguities of Spark's writing. There are boxes within boxes in the novella. The beauty of this staging is that it finds a theatrical form to reflect the style of Spark's prose.

In Sansom's tightly-wrought, unsettling, 90-minute production, Lise (played with compelling jaggedness by Morven Christie) travels alone to an Italian city, seemingly in search of a male companion as yet unknown to her. Dressed like a candy cane, her strident directness and brittle vulnerability attract worryingly strange men like Bill, a sinister macrobiotics advocate (played with revolting oiliness by Ryan Fletcher), and Richard, a stranger with an alarmingly dubious reputation (Michael Thomson in memorably sympathetic yet repugnant form).

Lise's motivations are as inscrutable as her unhappiness is palpable - a paradox which is typical of the production as a whole.

The piece combines a clarity of expression with an affecting opacity of meaning. Its short, sharp scenes and concise characterisations combine powerfully with conspicuous, on-stage filming. Consequently, one feels uncomfortably close to Lise's increasingly ominous encounters with members of the opposite sex, yet locked out of her thought processes.

One's bleak attraction to Christie's excellent performance is only possible due to the impressive mutual compatibility of every element of the show. From the perfectly paced ensemble to Ana Ines Jabares Pita's evocative-yet-utilitarian set, everything seems to swirl around the young protagonist, whose broken soul and fractured mind are dragging her inexorably towards an early grave.