Review – The Sash

✭✭✭✭✩   These colours still run

Cameron (Colin Little) tells Georgina (Michelle Gallacher) a few historical facts in Rapture’s production of The Sash. Photo © Richard Campbell

King’s Theatre
Tue 30 April – Sat 4 May 2013
Review by Irene Brown

The play is old but its themes are not beautiful; their colours far from fine.

Rapture’s revival of Hector MacMillan’s play about Scotland’s sectarianism feels like watching the opening of an old and ugly wound. Like looking at a semi-demolished tenement with its wallpaper still intact, evoking questions of the life that went on there.

Forty years on – the play is set in 1973 and has the language to match – and The Sash exposes some of these lives with harsh humour and in the unsanitised attitudes of the time.

It is the 12th of July. The day of the Orange Walk. Bill MacWilliam (Stewart Porter) is in swaggering form in anticipation of the celebrations while his son Cameron (Colin Little) is disaffected by the proceedings. Like a reverse striptease, Bill attires himself gradually over the piece from semmit and trousers to the full bowler-hatted-and-brollied regalia of the Order.

The father’s personal and highly enthusiastic walk around his living room as he dolls himself up impacts on his Irish Catholic downstairs neighbour, Bridget (Jane McCarry), inciting much ceiling banging from below and foot stomping from Bill. All the while, the tunes of the flute and accordion bands waft in the background, their sounds getting louder as the window is flung open to let in the stirring strains.

The complex history of two particular tribes

Bill MacWilliam (Stewart Porter) and Bridget (Jane McCarry) face-off in Rapture’s production of The Sash. Photo © Richard Campbell

Since the death of the woman in their lives, father and son live in bottle-strewn chip-paper chaos and the set shows this to good effect. It contains various shades of orange starting from the autumn coloured couch with orange and blue tea towels on its back. The tobacco-stained walls are adorned with the icons of the order – HM the Queen, King Billy on his white horse, the Lion Rampant alongside the flag of Ulster Scots bearing Red hand of Ulster, a photo of Ibrox Stadium and a Rangers scarf.

The two young women, Una (Ashley Smith) the pregnant Catholic niece of Bridget and Georgina (Michelle Gallacher) the baton twirling Orange marcher dressed like a glamorous Fran and Anna tribute, add pertinent voices in this darkly humorous exposé of the complex history of two particular tribes.

The performances from the five strong cast are as tight as the skin of the big drum on an Orange Walk. Jane McCarry’s accent sounded authentic though at times too muffled to make out the lines but her portrayal of the high buttoned, frilly pinnied, besom bashing Bridget is exceptional.

Stewart Porter is utterly superb as the staunchly Protestant gallus Glasgow male and is a colossus on stage. Their mutual grudged and gritted acknowledgement of their common humanity in time of need is grossly outweighed by their mutual blindness.

Colin Little and Ashley Smith convincingly allow their characters of Cameron and Una to bring a thoughtful balance and other ways of seeing the world they inhabit. Michelle Gallacher as the pivotal Georgina is a bright and perky element in the proceedings.

Will Fyffe’s song I Belong to Glasgow, acts as parenthesis to this play but these seams run deeply across other parts of Scotland too. The play’s revival is a timeous reminder of bigotry’s ugliness even if the specific issues of whether someone is a Billy, a Dan or as the old street chant included ‘an old tin can’, have been publicly tamped down.

The image of the bloodied but unbowed Bill MacWilliam hirpling off the stage under support still holds strong symbolism.

Running time 2 hours.
King’s Theatre, 2 Leven Street, Edinburgh
Daily Tue 30 April – Sat 4 May, 7.30pm (Matinees Wed, Sat 2.30pm)
Full details on King’s website: www.edtheatres.com

The Sash on tour

ENDS

Tags: Ashley Smith, Colin Little, Irene Brown, Jane McCarry, King's Theatre, Michelle Gallacher, Review, Stewart Porter, The Sash, Theatre