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Arts:Blog

Theatre Review: Para Handy

Joy Watters reviews that doesn't get a good head of steam until its second act.

Surrounded by autumn at its best, the theatre in the hills is looking `chust sublime’ to borrow from Neil Munro’s great comic creation: Para Handy. For it is the tales of the singular skipper and inimitable crew of the Vital Spark that propel the audience towards the festive season.

It is more than a century that the stories of Para, Macphail, Dougie and Sunny Jim, plying their trade in their old puffer on the west coast, first appeared in the Glasgow Evening News. It was the TV adaptations, all three of them, that brought the stories to a wider audience, in black and white and colour.

Pitlochry stages John Bett’s adaptation in which music, by Robert Pettigrew, has a major role to play with the band on stage alongside designer Becky Minto’s splendid Vital Spark.

Para Handy is subtitled `a voyage round the stories of Neil Munro,’ and here it is indeed a circumnavigation of Munro’s writing punctuated by music and song rather than a straightforward story-telling session.

It was not until the second half that the action got up a good head of steam and the audience really started responding. This was partly due to the fact that the stories of Para and crew were told directly and a host of mad characters inhabited the stage.

Director Liz Carruthers clearly enjoys the wonderful peculiarities of the Scottish (west coast division) psyche.

The idiosyncrasies of the crew are beautifully observed in a trio of performances. Stephen Clyde’s Macphail, Harry Ward’s Dougie and Scott Gilmour’s Sonny Jim. Keith Fleming as Para however fails to ignite his vital spark, seeming a little removed from the action.

Runs at Pitlochry Festival Theatre until November 13.

Tags: theatre

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