LIFE is one long tea-break in Chris Rattray's 1960s-set play, first seen on Dundee Rep's stage 14 years ago, and now revived in Andrew Panton's solidly assured production.
Performed back to back with Sharman Macdonald's She Town, this is the male flip-side to that play's women-only zone, as it follows a sextet of mill workers escaping from the daily grind via the laddish banter of the rest room and its accompanying toilets.
It's here we meet simple-minded skivvy Archie, old lags Robert, Geordie and Jim, upstart Teddy-Boy Henny and Beatle-loving Kevin, who mark time indulging in assorted shaggy-dog stories and pranks with seemingly little consequence.
Out of this comes a lovingly observed portrait of working class society in flux that revels in its localism even as it follows in the work-play tradition of John Byrne's The Slab Boys and Roddy McMillan's The Bevellers. Barrie Hunter's pompous Robert and Martin McBride's nasty Henny are both relics from an earlier age, while only Jonathan Holt's music-loving Kevin is looking towards any kind of future.
It may be Guy Mitchell's She Wears Red Feathers that opens the show, but it's Please Please Me by The Beatles that closes it. If those two recorded tunes book-end the play, it's Michael Marra's original songs, performed live by the cast, that provide its pulse. Soaked in pathos, stylistically they encapsulate the move from skiffle to rock'n'roll to the 1960s beat boom, mirroring society's greater shifts. The malicious act that thwarts Kevin's ambitions is telling, too, of how old orders cling to power by any means necessary.
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