THE GANG ’S ALL HERE!
The Festival offers everything from dodgy geezers to a literary doyenne ...and an old man’s moving insights
We MAY associate Irvine Welsh with raw fiction about nineties working- class scotland, but his new play Performers, hyped as one of the Festival’s big events, is set in late sixties London and aims for an almost farcical air with some farfetched trouser-dropping.
Is Irvine going soft in his old age? The show opens with Krayera gangsters arriving at the offices of film director Donald Cammell. They wait for him for ages — shades of Godot. Are they there to collect money or beat him up? no. They have come to audition for his latest film.
There is a factual basis for this. Cammell did indeed cast gangland toughs in Performance, a Mick Jagger/Anita Pallenberg film hated by its American backers for being violent and edgy. It has since acquired cult status.
our mobsters are Alf (immensely fat and avuncular) and knuckle- dustered Bert (dandyish, dim, itchily repressed). Perry Benson is in his plump element as Alf, squinting through thick spectacles.
George russo does his best with Bert’s meagre lines, but the pace of the thing is glacial. Maya Gerber is excellent as a strumpety secretary. Lewis Kirk, as a flower- power production assistant, calls to mind the young Jude Law.
With better projection and firm editing — they should strip away most of the Cockney rhyming slang, for a start — Welsh and his co-writer Dean Cavanagh could have a reasonable half-hour radio comedy on their hands.
Fat Alf is entranced by the idea of acting in a film and agrees to strip to his voluminous smalls — and beyond — for a screen test. There are some wry one-liners and the sight of Mr Benson’s enormous, bare gut has a certain theatrical novelty. YeT
one senses this project may originally have aspired to greater ambitions. Did it hope to tells us something about the vanity of violent men? Was there an idea of showing us a grittier side to Alf and Bert? If so, it was lost.
Cammell’s film Performance achieved artistic merit by aiming for darkness. Welsh and Cavend- ish’s play went the other way and feels a bit so what-ish.
For a real taste of gangsters mixing with drama, try the startlingly authentic Doglife, where former crime-world thug Thomas McCrudden again takes to the Fringe stage (as he did last year) to describe his troublescarred life.
Director Jeremy Weller and the Grassmarket Projects use drama to help people confront their experiences. The show, a bit whispery and delivered in chewy Glaswegian, takes the form of episodes between McCrudden and various women. His violent ways have left this bullish, muscular man darkly unable to cope with the words ‘I love you’.
It is theatre as a public confessional. At the end, McCrudden apologises to his family and also to the audience — society at large.
The cast of untrained actors are greatly believable. At a festival which has never felt so middle- class, what a welcome dose of reality this provided.