Theatre

The Lottery Ticket

Oran Mor, Glasgow

Mary Brennan, four stars

Money isn’t everything, they say. ‘They’ usually have enough to get by on and can afford high-minded platitudes. The rock-bottom poor, the homeless, the unemployed might beg to differ – men like Salih (Nebli Basani) and Jacek (Steven Duffy) who are sleeping rough in a bin shelter. Someone in their old hostel took exception to Salih’s ethnicity and religion – he’s a Kurdish Muslim – and Jacek, who’s Polish, intervened and now has two broken ribs.

When a lottery ticket flutters into Jacek's possession, Salih declares it is a sign from God: their luck will change, Jacek will be able to send money home again and he, Salih, will stop being an illegal asylum-seeker and return to his old life without fear of arrest and torture.

Ah, what are the odds that this pair will turn out winners? And yet, defying the inner voice of commonsense, your hopes do build up – partly because of the well-crafted writing and direction (with Donna Franceschild responsible for both) and certainly because of the sincere and sympathetic performances from Basani and Duffy as they convey the humanity, necessary humour and resilient dignity of comrades in adversity.

When the owner of the bin shelter, Rhona (Helen Mallon) bursts onto the scene, ranting about her blocked toilet, the men – in a nicely engineered symbol of social attitudes – are soon trying to deal with affluent Rhona’s effluence, her nippy condescension and ultimate hostility.

Basani’s resolutely positive Salih had introduced himself as a storyteller, hoping not to bore us, but to keep us guessing. The Lottery Ticket succeeds, tellingly, on both counts. Unlike Rhona, we become aware of Jacek's unstinting labour of love – grafting to support a far-distant family – and we understand that Salih’s faith, his optimism, is how he copes with being an outcast at the mercy of other people’s politics.

Who wins? The audience does – it’s a really fine play, resoundingly well done.