Our Fathers

Seen at Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh

Touring until November 18

The Maids

Dundee Rep

Until November 4

Reviewed by Mark Brown

"WRITTEN and performed by Rob Drummond and Nicholas Bone", reads the poster for Our Fathers, the new co-production between the Traverse Theatre and Edinburgh-based touring company Magnetic North. So the piece takes its place in a tradition of "devised" theatre that has become prominent (if not predominant) within new theatre work in Scotland. Indeed, one could be forgiven for wondering if playwriting is becoming a dying art in our country.

Don't get me wrong, I am a great admirer of many works in the devised genre. Akhe from Russia, Robert Lepage from Quebec and English dramatist Tim Crouch (who is, it seems to me, the inadvertent father of the millennial generation of Scottish theatremakers) are among the finest artists currently working in world theatre.

Scottish theatre's millennials, such as Rob Drummond (Bullet Catch), Nic Green (Trilogy), Kieran Hurley (Beats) and Gary McNair (A Gambler's Guide To Dying), have made some impressive pieces. Just how their output compares with that of the 1990s generation of Scottish playwrights (such as David Harrower, Zinnie Harris, David Greig and Anthony Neilson), however, is a moot point.

Too often the devised strand in Scottish theatre seems modest in ambition, both thematically and theatrically, and lacking in dramaturgical craft. Our Fathers is an abundant case in point.

The piece is inspired by Father And Son, the early-20th century book by the English writer (and Protestant fundamentalist) Edmund Gosse. Nicholas Bone (artistic director of Magnetic North) was given the memoir by his father, formerly the Anglican Bishop of Reading. He, in turn, encouraged Drummond (whose father is a retired Church of Scotland minister) to read Gosse's opus.

The resulting show is a cobbled together series of more or less interesting reflections on religion and the nature of the relations between Bone and Drummond and their fathers, intercut with somewhat dramatised sections from Gosse's book. Structurally, the piece barely hangs together: a fact that is aided not at all by the irritating, deliberately fake conflict between the two performers about who plays which character and the order in which scenes are presented.

A lovely musical score by Scott Twynholm and charming, museum-style design by Karen Tennent (beautifully lit by Simon Wilkinson) lend the show an aesthetic quality that is lacking in an otherwise uncertain, halting production.

There is a similar lack of conviction in Dundee Rep's disappointingly bloodless staging of Jean Genet's modernist classic The Maids. Director Eve Jamieson's production is set in the handsome, hyper-real boudoir of a bourgeois Paris apartment. The room is flanked, in pointlessly obvious metaphor, by two glass cabinets in which the housemaids (and sisters) Claire (Irene Macdougall) and Ann Louise Ross (Solange) sit, illuminated in red when inactive, and green when they must spring to life.

It is not ungallant of me, I hope, to point out that Macdougall and Ross are somewhat beyond the ages of their characters (who, Genet stipulated, are in their early to mid-30s). This generational shift is intriguing and could have worked, were both actors not so observably uncomfortable with the sadomasochism of the sisters' fantasy ritual regarding their despised mistress.

When the mistress (Emily Winter) finally arrives (in the midst of her recently arrested lover's crisis), she soon crosses the line between the character's self-dramatising and simple overacting. To the absence of sexual tension is added a lack of subtlety in the mutual class hatreds and personal resentments between the three women.

Self-conscious and quite insipid, this production compares badly with Stewart Laing's exciting, if uneven, all-male version of the play at Glasgow's Citizens Theatre in 2013.

For tour dates for Our Fathers, visit: magneticnorth.org.uk