Ni W W( )HK MELODY Traverse Theatre. Edinburgh, until Sat 1 Apr 0..

It’s a perversity of the human psyche that we‘ve never fully explained that people who treat us very badly are the ones we finish up devoting the most attention to. Take ex partners. The ones we held in affection, and let go with quiet and nostalgic sadness, seem to pass anonymously into the mists of time. People who behave disgracefully, on the other hand, require a lot of denial, which amounts to a huge piece of psychological energy. They are also the ones that are apt show up again when you least expect it.

This is problem of the eponymous Girvan working woman (Lynn Ferguson) in Douglas Maxwell‘s play. Her cheeriness and conscientious hard work seem from the start like an act of denial, something betrayed by her extra shifts to pay for the removal of a tattoo, the emblematic proclamation of emotional regret. Her life is dedicated to supporting a youthful misfit of a boyfriend (Bryan Lowe), a misbegotten media wanabee, and the mother of her former partner, a cantankerous old troublemaker (Una McLean). It’s a happy enough surrogate family on the face of it, but each is in denial, and the boil is soon to be lanced by the arrival of a young screwed up goth (Mhairi Steenbock), with an intimate connection to the ex.

Lorne Campbell directs Maxwell‘s well made play with intelligence, and in front of Jon Bausor‘s authentic feeling lower-class lounge room design, it all works pretty well. Maxwell’s dialogue at times resembles a kind of Central Scottish Galton and Simpson, which adds a pleasing homespun kind of wit to the action. Within the parameters of a naturalistic three acter, this piece works pleasingly, its thematics of repression, denial and the limits of confrontation all explored with precision. McLean’s vicious old granny and Lowe’s daggy, porn addicted boyfriend play out some delightful conflicts in an otherwise competent cast, but one wonders at the programming. The Traverse’s own production seems conservative and unambitious compared with its visiting shows this season. Having played host to such gobsmacking pieces as A Brief History of Helen of Troy, one wonders why, even given that this is good writing, the Trav can‘t be more ambitious in its ideas of its own productions. All the same, the piece is well worth a watch. (Steve Cramer)

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(Steve Cramer)

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Theatre

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I Whispers is still digesting the latest SAC funding announcements, but these continue to produce dyspeptic responses. His only comfort is that he is not alone in his discomfort. Whispers spends much time on your behalf lounging about the bars and foyers of Scottish Theatre and talking to the various luvvies who staff it. Although these funding exercises are never popular, Whispers can attest that after for too many years of covering such matters, never has a funding policy created such universal hostility.

This is less about the decisions made; the arts community might be divided about the cutting of such core funded companies as Borderline and 7:84, but the shambolic handling of the whole affair seems to have discontented winners and losers from the plan alike. Partially, this is about the torturous way in which the money, in hard facts and figures, has been announced. Even now, more than a fortnight after me announcement of the SAC’s plans, few concrete figures are available. Whispers can’t help but wonder whether the SAC is, under the traditional Blairite cover of a ‘consultation process’, hoping to string things out so long that the press loses interest in the final results.

Meanwhile there’s still the vexed issue of what ignoring audiences and focusing on artists actually means, beyond the bizarre social inclusion checklist which seems to the SAC to constitute an artist. The reaction across the board to this varies from alarm to mystification. Yet the enigma is not so great as that incorporating five-year funding plans being granted from a body that no longer has five years left to it. Perhaps herein lies the clue to this frankly eccentric plan. its criteria for defining the arts it controls have become odd enough to seem completely unlike that of Scottish Screen, and perhaps that's the point. By making itself so eccentric, the SAC’s future merger with the film body will guarantee its survival after the new body is formed. These changes are perhaps less about the theatre than the SAC, though that's of little comfort to its victims.

7:84‘s Freefall

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