Audiences like new plays. So it's heartening to find the Royal Exchange presenting a pair of premieres in rep on its main stage rather than shunting them into the studio. Equally surprising is that actor Simon Robson's contribution, The Ghost Train Tattoo, turns out to be a poetic study of middle-class family life of the kind Robert Bolt might have written in the 50s. Even if technically Robson has a lot to learn, his play has its own deeply felt truth.
He starts from the Tolstoyan assumption that each unhappy family is unhappy in its own unique way. In this case, we are in the comfortable Wiltshire home of an ex-naval officer, George, who over the years manages to destroy two marriages and the lives of his three children. Intending to do good, George causes irreparable harm by treating his offspring as if they were mutinous ratings who needed a touch of the lash; as a result, they are driven variously into flight, suicide and a loveless despair.
You could easily pinpoint Robson's faults. His structure is clumsy. He shifts the spotlight uneasily from one child to another. He is also woefully hazy on social detail: I longed to know how George was able to support two wives and a large family on a naval pension. But Robson's virtue is that he writes with burning indignation about the unthinking destructiveness of fathers: in one of the best scenes, George openly accuses his teenage son, Freddy, of having an affair with his piano-teacher, thereby killing both the boy's musical instinct and the teacher's career. George's first wife, ironically, works for the Swindon Samaritans; but Robson's point is that it is often the do-gooding middle classes who are the most dysfunctional and that we live still with the remnants of a ruined patriarchy where fathers are credited with a quasi-Biblical authority.
Flawed though the play is, it makes you flinch with recognition. Robson also has the gift of leaving scenes poetically suspended just before they reach the point of crisis: a reflection, I suspect, of his actor's instinct. Some parts are better written than others but, in Braham Murray and Sarah Frankcom's suitably mood-indigo production, Terence Wilton lends George exactly the right air of apologetic tyranny. There is incisive support from Joseph Murray as the introspective Freddy, Gabrielle Drake as his interventionist stepmother and Margo Gunn as the seductive piano teacher, whose resonant cry of "Fuck family!" I suspect Robson would endorse. In rep with Fiona Padfield's Snapshots until April 15. Box office: 0161-833 9833.
