Theatre

Losing The Rag

Oran Mor, Glasgow

Mary Brennan

two stars

The Edinburgh Fringe and Festival are now shutting up shop for another year. Right on cue, Oran Mor comes centre-stage with its autumn season of a Play, a Pie and a Pint. Between now and late November, thirteen new short plays will be presented and, as ever, they’ll deliver a mixed bag of well-intentioned writing.

First up: Losing The Rag by Alan Muir, directed by Ron Bain and delivered – with unswerving commitment to the art of script-resuscitation – by Gerry Mulgrew, Martin Donaghy and Louise Ludgate. I wish I could dissemble here. Pretend that this three-hander about a local newspaper, teetering on the brink of closure as the digital age displaces the printing press, was on a par with Muir’s previous PPP success, The Greatest. But somehow – despite Muir’s journalistic experiences – Losing The Rag falls away from that earlier play’s well-observed, persuasive humanity and into sitcom cliches about Derek, the grizzled old-school editor (Mulgrew), Barry the cub reporter who lives, breathes and tweets anything that’s on social media (Donaghy) and Susan, the able, stable professional journalist who is pitched between them (Ludgate). And while the core issues – job losses, diminishing resources and the clickbait factor – are totally in tune with today’s shape-shifting newspaper industry, the comedy often feels like yesterday’s jokes today.

The howlers that increasingly escape onto the page would, indeed, embarrass any Dereks who haven’t already volunteered for redundancy. But would they really go viral? On an internet already saturated with inconsequential outrage and winsome footage of furry, goofball animals? Perhaps Muir’s take on office banter is actually amusing – if, that is, you were never in a local newspaper’s office... And perhaps all of the above is just fake reviewing: the pie and the pint still please the palate, even if the play is not quite the toothsome thing I’d hoped for.