MUSICAL MY FAIR LADY Edinburgh Playhouse, Tue 6

Dec-Sat 7 Jan When My Fair Lady opened at London‘s National Theatre four years ago, it hit the headlines for all the wrong reasons. Its then star. Martine McCutcheon, was plagued by illness and her on—stage appearances were sporadic at best. But the show soon proved that it was more than the sum of its parts. winning five Olivier Awards and playing to consistently full houses. Directed by Trevor Nunn and choreographed by Matthew Bourne, it has a pedigree most musicals could only dream about. as well as a cast of

seasoned actors including Christopher

Cazenove as Professor Higgins and Russ Abbot as loveable rogue, Alfred Doolittle. ‘My Fair Lady has got the best of both worlds.‘ says Abbot. ‘George Bernard Shaw's Pygma/i'on, which is a great story. and Lerner and Loewe's music. So you can lighten it up and have a good time with the songs. and then treat the text as dark as you like - it's a wonderful contrast.” Abbot may have made his name wearing a Jimmy wig and kilt in his TV Mad House. but the actor has since performed on stage and screen in a number of serious roles. Playing Eliza Doolittle‘s drunken father in My Fair Lady allows him to use comic timing without going over the top. “There's humour in the whole piece.‘ he says. “But it's nice to be able to play it for wit and not belly laughs - you can sense the audience smiling.‘ (Kelly Apter)

MODERN CLASSIC THE HOMECOMING

Ramshorn Theatre, Glasgow, until Fri 2 Dec 000

If home is the heart of the family. then the setting of Harold Pinter's 1965 play is a disease-ridden one. its every beat a throbbing reminder of the poison slowly clogging the arteries of this north London terrace. And lording over it all is patriarch Max. an old bastard in a threadbare chair. He's head of a family bearing the everyday strain of

dysfunctionality.

In the year that Pinter‘s dark works of social decay have seen him honoured with a Nobel Prize for Literature. Strathclyde Theatre Group have taken on one of the playwright's most famous and controversial pieces. In The Homecoming. the return of prodigal son and university lecturer, Teddy. to his down-at-heel family is rapidly overshadowed by the presence of his wife Ruth. Like a sexually deviant Stepford wife, her silent pout sends the men around her into paroxysms of Iechery and longing followed

by a disturbing proposition.

Under Susan Triesman's direction, the cast succeed in hitting the occasional note of belligerent humour. But more pace is needed to prevent this difficult script from becoming overbearineg bleak. From the opening Mark Coleman brings a twinkly-eyed grimace and some much needed vigour to the role of Max one can almost smell his stale breath as he spits bile on all those around him. Meanwhile. as middle son Lenny. Peter Lamb slips easily into the cheap suit of small time criminality and compromised

morality.

In this timely revival the froideur of familial relations doesn't always carry a convincing chill. And beneath the characters‘ shallow words. one can't quite sense the full profundity of Pinter's meanings - the macabre vortex of violence and sexuality. (Corrie Mills)

Review

SCOTTISH PREMIERE

THE HISTORY BOYS

Theatre Royal, Glasgow. Run ended “00

Alan Bennett shares something with David Hare, which, despite their apparent disparity, makes them very kindred spirits. For both are experts in explaining the

British, or perhaps just the English, to themselves. They

show passion and repression in their characters that gains cachet from the very specificity of their world. So it is that the Britishness of a nevertheless multicultural group of students growing up in Thatcher’s Britain is what most adds emotional authenticity to the experience of this acclaimed piece. It actually starts in the present day, with a wheelchair- bound Blairite apparatchik and former television historian full of the philosophical emptiness of

postmodern relativism. He’s Irwin (Tobias Menzies), and

we next meet him two decades before, as a young history teacher at a high school driven by league tables and government achievement criteria. His miserable bureaucratic headmaster (Bruce Alexander) is very on- message with this, but an eccentric old English teacher Hector (Desmond Barrit) is not, teaching his students songs and scenes from old films. Meanwhile, a sensitive young Jewish boy (Steven Webb) gets a crush on the arrogant young wunderkind of the year (Jamie King), who also becomes the focus of repressed

Theatre

passion among the staff.

But what it’s all about is the idea of learning passed on from Britain’s days of industrial greatness in previous centuries, marked, as it was, by utilitarianism. In Britain intellectuals are not prized as in other cultures, and learning is only valued for what it gains you. Thatcherism, which still prevails in education, was in this sense a genuine return to Victorian values. Thus, Irwin’s formula for passing exams, which is about developing interesting angles without recourse to moral judgement, leads him into conflict with the Jewish boy’s parents after he applies relativism to the Holocaust. But Hector too fails to contribute to the student’s education, teaching the lad hymns instead. Neither can associate learning with moral redemption as Judaism does; for each, scholarship is not of value in itself.

In front of Bob Crowley’s simple schoolroom design, with cleverly used multimedia, there’s a canny mixture of camp and understatement, a seemingly impossible clash of ingredients tempered, in Nicholas Hynter’s production, by the familiar Britishness of the play’s pathos and humour. Even the casualness with which the boys treat their molestation by Hector, an explosively contentious issue in any other writer’s work, is smoothed over by a tablespoon of Britishness. This is a clever and endlessly amusing piece, marvellously acted by the cast, whose ultimate moral ambivalence is part of its value. (Steve Cramer)

1-15 Dec 2005 THI LIST”