Theatre reviews: Miss Lockwood Isn’t Well | Flight

Miss Lockwood Isn’t Well, Oran Mor, Glasgow ★★★

Flight, Citizens’ Theatre , Glasgow ★★★★

Religion isn’t the force it once was in Scottish life; but all the same, its historic impact still runs deep in our culture - sometimes in unexpected ways. James Reilly’s new Play, Pie and Pint drama Miss Lockwood Isn’t Well is a sprightly and sometimes startling comedy set around a Catholic primary school in modern secular Scotland, where an enthusiastic young teacher - Alice Lockwood - has been suspended from work, after starting to behave very oddly in class.

We meet Alice as she begins an interview with Dr Freer, a medical officer assessing whether she can return to work; and although Alice is not a very religious person, and has never given much thought to the Catholic faith into which she was born, she describes how she has been visited in class, while teaching, by a series of recognisable Catholic saints that only she can see.

At first, the saints only give Alice surprisingly down-to-earth advice, finding a lost earring (Saint Anthony), and warning her off some dodgy sea bass in the local restaurant (Saint Benedict). Things take a dramatic turn, though, when Alice starts to see the heads of her pupils on fire; and the Virgin Mary herself finally appears to her in the gym, as an Audrey Hepburn lookalike.

The interview is joined, meanwhile, by the school’s parish priest Father Mackin, a genial, twinkly fascist in a dog collar, eager only to crush and discredit poor Alice’s visions; and the show shapes up nicely as a conflict between a tired and often heartless old spirituality, and a possible vibrant new one - until Reilly abruptly drops the threads of his plot, in an ending that leaves us uncertain whether the play amounts to much at all, beyond a lively extended joke.

Catriona Macleod’s smartly-paced production features an entertaining trio of performances, though, from Karen Young as Alice, a lovely Jane McCarry as Dr Freer, and Mark Cox as Father Mackin. And the early dialogue between Alice and Dr Freer is full of fine comic mismatches between the doctor’s determinedly therapeutic and bureaucratic language, and Alice’s subjective experience; which seems, at least at first, to be not medical but spiritual, and to demand a language far more intriguing, and more beautiful.

The Citizens’ Theatre, meanwhile, plays host to a story that could not be more firmly rooted in the real-life horrors of our world, in the shape of Vox Motus’s internationally acclaimed installation theatre piece Flight, first seen at the Edinburgh International Festival a decade ago, and still all too timely.

Based on the novel Hinterland, by Caroline Brothers, Flight is a refugee story that follows the journey of two young brothers from Afghanistan to the UK, via “Tehran, Istanbul, Athens, Rome and Paris”, a route they chant almost like a litany.

The story is told, though, in a unique and poignant form, through a recorded soundtrack that audience members hear on headphones, while sitting in small individual booths around a central revolve which gradually unrolls, past our eyes, a series of intense, poignant, and beautifully made miniature installations depicting their journey.

Together, the boys endure gruelling long walks over mountains and plains, a terrifying sea journey, near slave labour as transient farm workers, as well as physical and sexual abuse. And although many scenes depict these harsh realities, this show also has its spiritual and surreal dimensions, as the boys imagine the French immigration police as screaming seagulls, or dream of better times to come.

The ending is sad; and the show’s cry for more humanity and empathy is beautifully expressed, not only in the late Oliver Emanuel’s spare and powerful script, but also in the tender, minute care with which the show has been constructed, reflected in the sheer power and poignancy of the tiny sculpted images that pass before our eyes.

Miss Lockwood Isn’t Well is at Oran Mor, Glasgow, until 28 March, and at the Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh, 31 March-4 April. Flight is at the Citizens’ Theatre, Glasgow, until 4 April.

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