Darlington Hippodrome – until 31 March 2018
2**
Middleground Theatre Company bring their world premier stage adaptation of Gallowglass to Darlington as part of their current UK tour.
Written by Ruth Rendell under the pen name of Barbara Vine, it had the potential to be a pretty good psychological thriller. But at almost three hours long it’s rather an unwielding, convoluted saga with superfluous characters and dialogue. Although there was an interesting twist at the end which no one sees coming, but by that time its too late.
Sandor (Joe Eyre) stops Joe (Dean Smith) from throwing himself under and underground train, making for a strange friendship. Sandor wants to kidnap Nina (Florence Cady), something he did once before when he lived in Italy and she was married to her first husband. Now remarried and living in Suffolk she is nervous and afraid of being kidnapped again, so her husband Ralph (Richard Walsh), hires Paul Garnett (Paul Opacic) to drive her around and take care of her. Paul is divorced with an eleven year old daughter, Jessica (Eva Sayer), of whom he has sole custody. The household staff is made up of Columbo (Matthew Wellman) the general handyman and his off stage wife Maria who we never see.
The story is helped along by a visit from Sandor’s mother Diane (Karen Drury) and by the arrival of Joe’s sister Tilly (Rachael Hart) who has some of the best lines in the whole performance.
Even though the show is very long, none of the characters are especially fleshed out, the dynamics of the relationships are missing. Would you save a man from suicide and in the same day introduce him to your plan to kidnap a leading beauty?
The set was very impressive, with half being the flat of Joe and Sandor and half being the tied cottage of Garnett and his daughter. Interesting use of projections onto backdrops was used for other scenes including the underground, railway stations, a country house and the seaside.
Gallowglass has great potential but would need a lot of the dialogue cutting to give us more twists and turns, to make it more breathtaking and gripping and to make us actually care about any of the characters involved
In Darlington until Saturday and on tour around the UK