Theatre

The Empty Charcoal Box

Oran Mor, Glasgow

Mary Brennan

three stars

THE past is not only a foreign country, it is one that you should avoid obsessively revisiting, especially if the souvenirs you’re still holding onto are guilty memories and unreconciled regrets. For Billy, however, it seems as if the past is determined to repatriate him, make him relive the mistakes he made some 45 years earlier when he was a fifteen year old lad out to humiliate a school-mate he blamed for getting him expelled.

That school-mate, Eddie (James Mackenzie), is the preternaturally cool teenager whose best pals probably envy him as much as they like him. No doubt they wish they had the confident charm to way-lay Sonja Kristina – the seriously gorgeous lead singer with 70’s progressive rock band, Curved Air – but they’re willing to live vicariously as Eddie feeds them details of his exclusive interview, and his plans to send it to the NME. So why does the friendship between Eddie, Billy and the slightly geeky Deansy (Gavin Wright) come so drastically unstuck? Because Billy (Ryan Fletcher) jumps to a wrong conclusion, and to elaborate on that would turn writer/director Stuart Hepburn’s stream of consequences into a trickle of improbabilities.

Even so, there’s fun to be had from Hepburn’s droll nod in the direction of late 80’s agit-prop theatre, with Billy’s right-on agendas the very stuff of yesterday’s tub-thumping productions. Pop culture, too, shades in a useful timeline, with the cast harmonising superbly on a live rendition of the Proclaimers’ Letter From America. As we’re fast-forwarded through Billy’s life, he still remains something of a two-dimensional cipher, uneasy in himself because of his past actions. The final twist doesn’t bring him much comfort, or us a real sense of dramatic closure in what is the first production of the Autumn Play, Pie and Pint season