Theatre

International Waters

Tron Theatre, Glasgow

Keith Bruce

Four stars

THERE is no kitchen sink in writer-director David Leddy’s new work for Fire Exit, but his four actors could certainly use one by the end of their 80 minute trip round the terrors of the modern world, to remove the blood, vomit and incontinence they have had to demonstrate and endure.

Although no kitchen sink drama in the realist sense, in the familiar metaphorical usage, Leddy deploys everything but. That is particularly true in its literary borrowings, explicit in liftings from Shakespeare and Melville, but present throughout. There are allusions to the theatre of Shaw, Coward, and Ibsen and, as you might have guessed from the above, Sarah Kane. Other literary and historical sources are acknowledged in the programme, although not any reference to Ian Fleming’s Bond villains, which seemed obvious to me.

Selina Boyack, Claire Dargo, Lesley Hart and Robin Laing are a Whitehall apparatchik, financier’s wife, star photo-journalist and musical celebrity onboard the last ship out of a strife-torn London, confined in the Big Brother-like Caliban suite. Subverting the forms of farce and drawing-room comedy, this contemporary morality play is concerned with weighty issues but takes itself none too seriously before it eventually reveals itself as a thriller.

Great performances, terrific design by Becky Minto, clever use of music from Old-timey Americana, via devotional choral to the Sugarcubes and Ellington’s Come Sunday, combine with some very nifty technical touches, particularly at the start, to make this production a theatrical tour-de-force.

But that contextualising opening seems long ago by the tale’s end, and some might find the journey chilly and too clever by half.