Last week in the Bank of Scotland Children's International Theatre Festival, the multinational NIE company presented The End of Everything Ever, a heart-breaking play about kindertransport and Nazi persecution. It told the story of a Jewish girl who was compelled to flee Berlin for London, and who later returned to find her home destroyed and her family gone.
Henry Adam's new play, 'e Polish Quine, goes into similar territory - its pivotal scene involves a moving vision of Auschwitz, and it is concerned with the wartime movement of people across Europe. But by choosing a tone of reflection, the playwright denies himself the immediacy his emotive subject matter deserves.
Adam's concern is for the way people can be alienated from the land of their birth. You can imagine the Wick-born playwright - the author of Edinburgh Fringe shows The People Next Door and Petrol Jesus Nightmare #5 - identifying with his returning hero David (a stony-faced Fraser C Sivewright) who is desperate to reconnect with his Aberdeenshire roots after six years serving in the second world war.
As far as the locals are concerned, he is, to use his own analogy, like Lazarus returned from the dead, but smelling so foul they wouldn't let him back in the village. Anna, the Polish quine (young woman) of the title, seems better adjusted to her new home, despite being a refugee from political persecution and a victim of racism, than David, who grew up on his father's farm until university took him away. Played with a hard-nosed energy by Magdalena Kaleta in Matthew Zajac's dimly lit production, Anna believes it is best to "travel light" and put the guilt and horror of the past behind her. By contrast, her would-be lover David is caught in a mental limbo.
In this sense, he is like a brooding Hamlet, incapable of taking action at a point when the whole of postwar society was taking stock, dreaming of the "century of the common man" but uncertain how to achieve it. Dramatising such stasis is hard, however, and although there is a lyrical richness to Adam's Doric dialect, and a certain momentum to the performances, you can't avoid the feeling that the real drama has already happened, revealed to us in memories but never fully present on stage.
· On tour until June 23. Details: 01463 798762.
