Theatre
Late Sleeper
Oran Mor, Glasgow
Mary Brennan
three stars
HELL, according to Sartre, is other people. For George Adams, that philosophical conjecture becomes a nightmarish reality when he finds himself sharing a two-bunk cabin on an overnight sleeper from London to Glasgow. His journey comes close to being derailed even before the train has left the station: he has a run-in with the attendant, Bernadette, a decidedly nippy sweetie who is a stickler for correct procedure. George is rostered as sleeping in the top bunk, he asks to swap to the lower one, however Bernadette (Barbara Rafferty, in a somewhat ill-fitting uniform and a suspiciously trowelled-on sarf London accent) is hellishly obdurate. George’s worst fears – no privacy, no sleep – escalate when his cabin-companion, Goags, arrives with several cans of beer and a relentlessly talkative disposition that has a tinge of menace edging through its Glesca’ cadences.
Could it become a case of Murder on the Caledonian Express? Might Bernadette be in (mischievously unconvincing) disguise? Can some sharp repartee, killingly delivered by Neil Leiper as the bit of rough in a hoodie, Goags, add up to a one-act comedy of terrors? No, no and not really. Simon Macallum’s three-hander – merrily boosted by director Ken Alexander – hinges on the fact that George (Vincent Friell) writes gritty thrillers, supposedly based on his own connections with real-life criminals in his native Bridgeton. In fact George, now a denizen of Crouch End, is a poseur and a wuss, and Friell is hugely entertaining as he sheds layers of bluster under Goag’s conniving mix of misinformation and genuine vendetta. One person’s fiction can, it seems, be another’s actuality – though it’s doubtful if any dude as cool and collected as Goag would hatch a revenge plot as implausible as this.
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