Theatre

A Respectable Widow Takes To Vulgarity

Oran Mor, Glasgow

Mary Brennan

****

VULGARITY has breenged back to Oran Mor with the same mischievous swagger that so delighted Play, Pie and Pint audiences when this one-act was first staged in 2013. Fulsome accolades followed the play’s appearance at the Edinburgh Fringe (August 2013) and resulted in a transfer to New York’s 59E59 Theater the following spring. Six years, to the very day of its PPP premiere, Douglas Maxwell’s cleverly-calculated barrage of f-words and c-words returns, sympathetically re-cast and marginally updated - whereupon history simply repeats itself.

From the moment young Jim encounters the widowed Annabelle and blurts out his expletive-laden tribute to her late husband, the audience laughter erupts and doesn’t stop until the final ribald punch-line.

Now, do we really believe that the fragrant Annabelle is so unfamiliar with, and so fascinated by, Jim’s default vocabulary of swear words that she demands he teaches her to be garrulously foul-mouthed? Well, grief can make people do strange things... so we go with it. Not least because Anne Kidd brings a subtle clarity to Maxwell’s little hints of regret - perhaps guilt? - in Annabelle’s memories of her husband’s rough and ready origins.

Origins not unlike Jim’s working-class background, origins her husband rejected when they married and he became upwardly mobile. It’s this cultural/linguistic class divide that interests Maxwell, not solely as a springboard for gleeful comedy but as a commentary on the social mores that pigeon-hole people by their accent and turns of phrase.

Jim the apprentice already knows this: it’s the ‘you’re thick’ label that, once applied, sticks until you come to believe it. Craig McLean, making a terrific professional debut, takes Jim from initial embarrassment and confusion over Annabelle’s bizarre request to a point of friendship and fellow-feeling where his range of facial expressions speak volumes.

See Vulgarity? See hilarity? See real class acting by Kidd and McLean? Just (expletives deleted) go!