Scotland is currently the prime source of works about drugs. And after the facile sensationalism of Trainspotting it's a relief to report that Henry Adam's play, first seen at the Edinburgh Traverse, is a sombre, serious study of addiction. What it doesn't fully explain is why it so afflicts an apparently confident, prosperous country like Scotland.
The Wick-born Adam sets his play in the Highlands, where Ray returns to his grandmother's cottage with his friend Neil. Both are heroin addicts in their early 20s, seeking an escape from urban pressure and the death of friends. During the trip they meet up with Chaimig, an old blind poet-farmer who was Ray's childhood mentor, and his adoring granddaughter, who has sacrificed a university education to look after him. But, although Ray and Neil encounter philosophical values and a way of life entirely opposed to their own, they remain cocooned in a cooking-up drug culture.
Adam has a poetic sense of place, a genuine gravity, and offers several clues as to Ray and Neil's problem. Not only are they victims of a rootless, market-dominated society, but they have also inherited the morbidity and irresponsibility that, Adam implies, runs through Scottish life. Neil comes across an old copy of Barrie's Peter Pan in the cottage and falls eagerly on the hero's cry of "no one is going to catch me and make a man"; and, lest we miss the point, Mark Leese's design shows the boy Peter declaring "to die will be an awfully big adventure". But while I accept the element of escapist death wish in heroin addiction, I still feel Adam avoids the real question: what precisely is it about modern Scotland that has created a huge drug problem in many of its key cities?
Plays are works of art rather than social documents but Adam leaves too much out: he never explains, for instance, how Ray and Neil finance their expensive habit. Where he does score, if that's the right word, is in creating a pervasive sense of sadness and loss. It is well realised in John Tiffany's production and in the fine performances of Adam Robertson and Mark Channon as the young addicts and, most especially, in Billy Riddoch's blind sage, for whom the Highlands is "the land of the dispossessed" and Lesley Hart's touching portrayal of his granddaughter. Grieve though the family couple may, at least Adam implies through them that there is a moral alternative to the addict's narcissistic nihilism.
Until May 19. Box office: 020-7610 4224.
