Theatre reviews: Feis | The Talented Mr Ripley

Feis, Oran Mor, Glasgow ★★★

The Talented Mr Ripley, Festival Theatre, Edinburgh ★★★

It’s always a high risk strategy to write a play dominated by characters that even a mother could not love; yet that’s exactly what Anna McGrath has done in the latest Play, Pie And Pint lunchtime show of this autumn season.

Set in the fiercely competitive world of Irish dancing in Scotland, Feis tells the story of superb dancer Deirdre, a former champion and single mum who runs a dance school named in memory of her late father - said to have been a great Irish patriot - and also raises money by selling online sex sessions to men who are turned on by the sight of a grown woman in a girlish Irish dance outfit.

Her dreams of vicarious glory turn to dust, though, when her teenage daughter Aoife - raised to be a world-beating dancer - cracks under the pressure and runs away to search for her long-lost father, reducing Deirdre to some grotesquely manipulative behaviour in her attempts to get her back and dancing again. Meanwhile, Deirdre’s domineering mother Maura is berating Aoife’s replacement in hideously bullying terms, while Brian James O’Sullivan, at the keyboard and decks, keeps the dance rhythms coming, and provides a sceptical male presence.

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The problem with Deirdre and Maura, in other words, is that they are both monsters, obsessed with dancing achievement to the exclusion of any shred of mother love, and therefore only briefly amusing, before they become repetitive and boring.

The drama improves a little after Aoife’s return, since she is a genuinely sympathetic character; but despite the best efforts of Louise Haggerty as Deirdre, Julie Coombe as Maura, and Leah Bamforth as Aoife, it proves difficult to make much of this improbable tale, built around two women so completely daft and unpleasant that even their closest relatives, it seems, would flee the country to avoid them.

The central character in Patricia Highsmith’s great novel The Talented Mr Ripley is not so much unpleasant as shocking; an apparently harmless if slightly seedy young man about New York who is sent to Italy by the wealthy father of an acquaintance to try to persuade the absentee son to come home.

Once in Italy, though, Tom Ripley becomes so obsessed with this rich young man living an idyllic life of leisure that he eventually murders him, assuming his identity, his lifestyle, and his access to a generous trust fund; and begins a new life as an affluent fugitive.

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Director Mark Leipacher’s touring stage version of the story, briefly in Edinburgh this week, struggles a little to come to terms with the book’s intense account of Ripley’s inner life, which is transformed here into a series of none-too-theatrical monologues intercut with live encounters between Ripley and the other key characters, including his quarry Dickie Greenleaf and Dickie’s close friend Marge. For the first hour, the play therefore seems a little lost on the big stage of the Festival Theatre, confined to a small platform centre-stage, and only occasionally illuminated by a wider framework of neon lights that suggest shifts into another reality, where Ripley sees himself act, react and retake, like an actor on a film set.

After the murder, though, the need for explanation of Ripley’s inner state becomes more urgent, and the pace of the action picks up rapidly, as the sheer strength of the story asserts itself. Ed McVey’s performance as Ripley is increasingly compelling and charismatic; and there is powerful support from Bruce Herbelin-Earle as Dickie, Maisie Smith as Marge, and Christopher Bianchi as police inspector Roverini, in a slightly over-long show that demands hard work from the audience at first, but finally rewards it with an intriguing take on one of the greatest and most disturbing crime novels ever written.

Feis is at Oran Mor, Glasgow, until 20 September, and at the Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh, from 23-27 September. The Talented Mr Ripley is at the Festival Theatre, Edinburgh, until 20 September.

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