Devil Masters, The--Traverse, Edinburgh

Meet Cameron Leishman. He and his wife Lara are our Devil Masters. Read more …

Two revered Edinburgh Advocates, this husband-and-wife duo know all about rules. They know all about winning. They’ve been winning from day one. They have the Edinburgh New Town flat, the designer wardrobes and more fig compote than you can swing a gavel at.

John, on the other hand, presents a very different world view. Today, standing in their front room, he’s playing by his own rules. Caledonian rules, ken.

With the Leishman family dog held for ransom, a tense battle of wills ensues as the lines between right and wrong are blurred and pack mentality sets in. Who will gain the upper hand in this class war when natural justice comes calling?

Acclaimed writer Iain Finlay MacLeod’s surrealist black comedy twists the ordinary and teases us with the extraordinary, asking what we become when we peel away the layers of class division and social decorum. Directed by award-winning Traverse Artistic Director Orla O’Loughlin who brought us festival favourites Spoiling in August 2014, Ciara in August 2013 and The Arthur Conan Doyle Appreciation Society in Autumn 2012.

The critical consensus

This is no bitter satire on the very moral passing judgement on the very immoral, more a safe Christmas souffle for audiences to lap up.

(*) (*) Ken Wilson, TVBomb, 11/12/2014

A truly alternative Christmas entertainment, which was much more extreme in its depiction of class conflict, could have been interesting. As it stands, this seems too determined not to offend the real-life Camerons and Laras of Edinburgh, and falls between two stools.

(*) (*) (*) Hugh Simpson, All Edinburgh Theatre, 11/12/2014

Lara and Cameron get rather more than they bargained for in Iain Finlay Macdonald’s ‘The Devil Masters’. We, the audience, perhaps get rather less.

(*) (*) Bill Dunlop, Edinburgh Guide, 11/12/2014

Keith Fleming does a great job as the amorphous outsider who is psychopathic one minute and vulnerable the next, while John Bett and Barbara Rafferty play up the contradictions of the homeowners. But they are stuck in an overwrought curate’s egg of a play.

(*) (*) (*) Mark Fisher, The Guardian, 12/12/2014

You could take it as a joke, or as a frighteningly dark political allegory, but it needs to clarify its mood, and sharpen its thinking, if it’s ever to achieve its full dramatic impact.

(*) Joyce McMillan, The Scotsman, 13/12/2014

As increasingly absurd as things become in the play's comically cutting dissection of snobbery, prejudice and just how divided a city Scotland's capital can be sometimes, to fully hit home it could be even more manic and even more savage in its delivery.

(*) (*) Neil Cooper, Coffee-Table Notes, 13/12/2014