Theatre reviews: The Glasgow Poisoner | Oran

The Glasgow Poisoner, Oran Mor, Glasgow ★★★★

Oran, Paisley Arts Centre ★★★★

Opening in the very week that the Scottish Parliament voted to scrap Scotland’s ancient and contentious “not proven” verdict, the latest Play, Pie and Pint lunchtime show, The Glasgow Poisoner, is a riotously clever and entertaining 60-minute musical inspired by one of history’s most notorious “not proven” decisions.

The case of Madeleine Smith – a wealthy Glasgow society belle who in 1857, aged just 22, was accused of murdering her lover Pierre L’Angelier by arsenic poisoning – was sensational 170 years ago, and in a sense remains so now, since the truth of the case never fully emerged. Jen McGregor and Tom Cooper’s musical drama plays delicious games with that uncertainty. Our narrator is “Plume”, a pamphleteer and journalist dedicated, so he says, to exposing the truth. The facts of the case are dealt with in a single brilliant opening number, Penny Dreadful Story, as McGregor and Cooper briskly introduce the characters and their story, to the merry chords of musical director Samuel Macdonald’s onstage parlour piano.

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Once the famously ambiguous verdict is given, though, the play begins to put Chiara Sparkes’s brilliantly sensuous and unrepentant Madeleine through the rumour-mill of history, exploring scenario after scenario which might account for Pierre’s death, without simply accepting the strong circumstantial evidence that Madeleine poisoned him after he threatened to expose their scandalous affair.

The result is a fierce kaleidoscope of 19th-century possibilities that, in this version, have some powerful 21st-century resonances, from the ethics of voyeuristic crime journalism, to the insistence of the male gaze that cannot cope with good-looking young women who do not want to be defined by men, preferring to take their own pleasures where they find them.

Sparkes’s Madeleine is superbly supported both by Morgan E Ross’s Plume, and by David Joseph Healy, in tremendous voice as Pierre; and if, by the end, poor Plume is reduced to a gibbering wreck by Madeleine’s stubborn refusal to tell “the true story” – well, perhaps there is some rough justice in that, if nowhere else in this delightfully scandalous tale.

Wonder Fools’s 2024 Fringe hit Oran, by contrast, is a bold and ferocious 60-minute stage poem set in a 21st-century online world where people are easily seduced into sexual situations that can lead, perhaps not to murder, but to self-loathing and self-destruction.

Written by Owen Sutcliffe, performed in heart-stopping bravura style by Robbie Gordon, and now embarking on an epic 19-date Scottish tour, the play tells the story of Oran, a lonely boy who first finds a much-loved best friend in Ewan, and then destroys that friendship, siding with online school bullies against the quiet and non-macho Ewan, and contributing – he fears – to Ewan’s early death.

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Oran therefore sets off for the Underworld – in one of the oldest stories ever told – to see if he can find his friend, and bring him safely back. In a thrilling hour of theatre, he descends an infernal lift-shaft through floors that relentlessly confront him with his own tragedies, failures and cruelties, cajoled and harried all the way by a mocking demonic voice, until he finally sees Ewan, and Ewan sees him.

The writing is thrilling and shamelessly poetic, the setting a visual feast and nightmare of glaring neon and swirling video effects. Jack Nurse’s direction is flawless; the music by VanIves – deejayed by Gordon himself during the show – superbly fulfils its own mission of sounding like “something between a gig and a myth”.

And at the heart of this modern Orpheus and Eurydice tale, there lies a true sense of tragedy; of love needlessly lost not once but twice, and then countless times, in memory.

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