Theatre

Small World

Oran Mor, Glasgow

Mary Brennan

four stars

SOMEWHERE in the hinterlands of Partick, the long-exiled King Maximilian X of Octavia, sits, not on a throne, but in a saggy armchair. He’s disconsolate, prone to flurries of paranoia – he reckons anyone lingering outside the tenement is either a spy or an assassin – and while he nurses his memories to keep them warm, there are bouts of forgetfulness that hint at encroaching dementia. Max, however, is not alone in exile. His adult son, Crown Prince Pauli, lives with him. Apparently Pauli is a high-flying financier. Really? Ah well, there’s one of the rubs that will cause hilarity and humiliation as Sean Hardie’s splendidly daft two-hander edges out of the madcap comic zone and into the darker, troubling waters of family responsibilities, painful home truths and a father-son relationship where real life is always kept at arm’s length or hidden away behind cushions.

The part of Max is, quite simply, a gift that Hardie and director Ron Bain tied up with sparkly ribbons and then handed over to Jimmy Chisholm who makes it utterly his own. Cranky, carnaptious, demanding – Chisholm’s Max amuses us greatly while stretching Pauli’s patience to snapping point. But there’s a savvy, wily side to Max that springs into action when Pauli (Daniel Cahill) goes out, leading us to wonder if Max is a Great Pretender in more ways than merely monarchical. Cahill, cutting a wannabe dash in his dark suit, breezily answering phone calls like he was a player with magnates and women alike, is actually guilty of colluding in his father’s self-aggrandising tosh. But as their shabby little room fills with Max’s fantastical descriptions of childhood privilege in Octavia or of royal ancestors with peculiar characteristics, both men are revealed as dreamers: ridiculously, painfully impractical and forever yearning,forlornly, to belong somewhere. If only they could decide where that was!

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