Curiouser and curiouser | 17 January 2013

A tragicomic curiosity at the Finborough written by Hebridean exile Iain Finlay Macleod. The show opens with James, a young Gaelic-speaker, running an internet start-up in London. Business booms. He grows rich and marries his gorgeous university squeeze. The only snag in his life, and it’s quite a serious one, is that he suffers from a constant urge to turn a somersault whenever something remarkable happens. Bust-up with the wife. Somersault! Best mate arrives from college. Somersault! Business goes broke. Somersault! Dad contracts cancer. Somersault!

Short of cash and plunged into despair, James is visited by a creepy bailiff who engages him in obliquely amiable conversation while bagging up his collection of LPs. (An LP, for younger readers, is a recording format from the days when music was exchanged for money.) James’s wife — a role so underwritten that she might as well be a bewigged mute — is appalled to discover that she’s been severed from her hubbie’s pot of loot so she punches the ejector button and lands on his best mate.

Skint and freshly cuckolded, James mopes up to the Hebrides and holds a series of increasingly lightweight conversations with his increasingly lightweight father. They speak Gaelic much of the time. No subtitles. It’s rather soothing to hear a pair of melancholics swapping inscrutable pleasantries in a sub-Arctic, singsong tongue but it makes for a depthless and baffling drama.

In the closing minutes, the script shifts into a different genre, the lecture, which is probably what it wanted to be all along. A strangely foul-mouthed dissertation it is, too. Hard to understand why Macleod chose to sprinkle his philological observations with lots of effing and blinding. The actors clearly find it uncomfortable and a sensitive director would have purged the expletives.