AN eerie sense of menace combines with the sharp whiff of comedy to make the Royal Lyceum's new production of JM Barrie's ghost story an exceptionally fine theatrical treat.
A young man made brave by life in the trenches of the First world war, Ha
rry (Guy Fearon), is looking round a dusty old house stuck out in the middle of nowhere.
Faced with the cobwebs of negligence and a crabbit old housekeeper (Una McLean) it soon emerges through his banter that this was the childhood home he left at the age of twelve. And behind the housekeeper's harshness lies her fear of something sinister which haunts the decrepit rooms.
Left alone in front of the drawing room fire for ten minutes, Harry is drawn into the memories which inhabit the room – of the people who used to live there.
With a nicely turned scenery change, the room reverts to its original finery as the play slips back 30 years. It is a time when Mr and Mrs Morland – played by Michael Mackenzie and Anne Kidd – used to sit of an evening, bantering with their friend Mr Amy (John Ramage).
If the voiceover that sets up the scenes by pointing to the changing times seems a little clunky, while Mackenzie and Kidd are marginally incongruous as young forty year-olds, everything else is pleasingly tight as young Simon Blake (Perri Snowdon) comes by to ask for the hand of their daughter, Mary Rose.
Kim Gerard plays the title role, an eighteen year-old girl, with a pleasing and finely judged sense of innocence – mixed with something just a little other. Her hints bear out the story her parents have to relate to Simon of an incident in her early youth. One summer, on a holiday, she mysteriously disappeared from a tiny, perfect little island on which she was sketching while her father fished. Only to turn up again, weeks later, as if nothing at all had happened.
As the importance of this event becomes clear over the ensuing scenes, Philip Pinsky's score is an ever-present hint to the sense that something more than ethereal, but moody and haunting too, is hidden within the play.
When Simon and Mary Rose return to the island as a married couple, a brilliant Robin Laing balances comedy and earnestness as the young gillie, Mr Cameron. A man whose religion does not stop him being aware of the island's hidden charms.
The best theatre is always a bit more than entertainment, carrying something of relevance to its audience. In this case, a play written in the 1920s makes powerful use of the impermanence of that which is left behind when a character steps out of time, in its telling of the ghost story.
There is no such commentary relevant to a generation lost in a World War here for a 21st century audience. Instead, in an audacious exaggeration of the existing twist at the play's ending, director Tony Cownie turns it on its end by calling into question the status of childhood itself.
It is a chilling twist, coming in the final cry of the play. Although its bitterness is not obvious at the time, it is the sort that will come back to haunt you, as you wake with a shiver in the middle of the night.
Run ends November 15The full article contains 571 words and appears in Edinburgh Evening News newspaper.
