Lorna Irvine reviews a production with some great moments but 'feels overlong, overwrought...and a little bit compromised'.
Alan Warner's novel The Sopranos has to be one of the finest Scottish novels of the last twenty years—funny, poignant and beautiful.
So director Vicky Featherstone and adapter Lee Hall had quite a task in bringing it to the stage.
Sadly, it's rather patchy, taking a while to hit its rhythm before degenerating into an emotionally manipulative sludge.
The story of six young Oban teens from a Catholic school, and their drunken fornications, should be an absolute riot. Some scenes, like a toe-curling sexual encounter with a cancer patient, are brilliant, retaining the black humour nicely.
Most of the cast are great—in particular Dawn Sieveright as feisty Fionnula, struggling with her burgeoning lesbian sexuality, and Karen Fishwick as Kay, the object of her desire who isn't as prim as she initially seems. Frances Mayli McCann also deserves a mention as Kylah: all lipstick and nae knickers.
But the novel's very accurate themes, in spite of some funny, scatological one-liners, are diluted by a show which goes all Glee with ghastly stage school renderings of ELO songs.
The girls' voices are undoubtedly gorgeous—with spine-tingling harmonies on the classical pieces and an emotive cover of Bob Marley's 'No Woman, No Cry'.
It just feels overlong, overwrought...and a little bit compromised.
Reviewed at the Tron. On tour throughout Scotland and England.
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