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Dr Stein **
St Serf's Church Hall
BRISTLING with couthy one-liners, Jonathan North's comic imagining of what happened when Dr Frankenstein came to Edinburgh must have made Leitheatre's mouths water. Here's a potentially delicious comedy in which Frankensein - now known as plain old Dr Stein - takes up lodgings in the basement of the Southside residence of hoity-toity Widow Ramsay. It's on account of all the body snatching, of course, that he has made his way to Edinburgh. Drummed out of his Swiss hideaway by the local peasantry, he's brought all his apparatus, experiments and even a few body parts with him, and he's about to start looking for a new body to revive. The play has plenty of "Doctor who?" style modern quips, bucket loads of local references, a racy application of modern feminist ideals to 1820s foppish social mores, and enough Scots dialect to script Oor Wullie up until Christmas. What on earth happened to Leitheatre, then? Maybe they took fright at this surfeit of riches. But they certainly don't do it justice in the first half. Although with the arrival in the second half of Steve McDowall as Stein's latest creation, Frankie, it does pick up and begin to achieve its potential. For the first 50 minutes, however, Mike Paton's direction is woefully lacking. The pace is slow, it lacks movement, and the stage is clearly set for things to come but which do not materialise until after the interval. What's more, the comic timing is way, way off. Phyllis Ross as Mistress Meg Ramsay and Dorsay Larnach as her servant, Allie Lamont, spend what seems like hours standing around making an inventory of the room that Dr Stein is to take. And they fail to find any of the potential in what should be hilarious Edinburgh archetypes. A bit of energy is injected by Fiona Mackay, who plays Widow Ramsay's daughter, the feisty Mirren. Don Arnott also puts in a solidly comic role as Allie's put-upon husband, Jock. Ali May and Debra Barrie do their best to inject a bit of love interest, as Jamie Ramsay, fresh back from London, and Elspeth Forrest, his one true love who has an intriguing hint of a dark past. Things perk up with the arrival of Billy Renfrew as Dr Stein, but that's largely down to Elsie Horobin as Harri McLeavy - a young lady who has made herself up as a boy in order to take a job as his assistant. At least the boot up the backside this production needs does eventually arrives though. The second half bristles along as McDowall realises that this is not a historically accurate representation but a big load of fun, a spoof packed with brilliantly appalling puns that fully deserves every bit of hamming it up it receives. The shame is that so much work has gone into the production. Derek Blackwood's set design is excellently conceived - if not quite as well executed. Which is a bit like the production as a whole. There's plenty here to amuse - but not enough to satisfy as well as it might. |
