Bertolt Brecht and Finnish writer Hella Wuolijoki’s 1940 comedy Mr Puntila and His Man Matti has often been likened to a meeting of Karl and Groucho Marx, on account of its witty socialist perspective on the seesawing relationship between canny chauffeur Matti and Puntila, his landowning boss of binary moods - grinding the noses of the poor when sober, scattering largesse when drunk. This new production is mounted by the Royal Lyceum and Glasgow Citizens in association with DOT, the Istanbul company founded by director Murat Daltaban, who won awards and mixed reviews for his take on Ionesco’s Rhinoceros at the Edinburgh Festival in 2017. Here,with its misplaced, turgid attempts at 20th-century European grotesque (intensified by Tom Piper’s overcomplicated and functionally irrelevant black-scaffolding set, decorated with faux-ironic stags’ heads, barbed wire and elaborately painted backdrops).
Adapter Denise Mina relocates the action from early 20th-century rural Finland to a Scotland that is a bizarre blend of past and present, with characters entitled to holiday pay and student loans, yet also presenting themselves for hire at an annual fair. Mina also gender switches Puntila from Mr to Mrs, thereby pulling dramatic punches that could have had added clout in our #MeToo times. Such changes feel erratic and half-baked, making for a dramaturgical fuzziness that dissipates the play’s satire and blunts its humour (some laugh-aloud lines excepted).
Daltaban’s relentless emphasis on an artificially stilted performance style seems to smother the life from the cast. Even the bright comic talents of Elaine C Smith as Mrs Puntila and Steven McNicoll as Matti are dimmed. They reach full wattage mainly when Smith and/or McNicoll directly addresses the audience, pointing out plot points in danger of being lost (not least because song lyrics delivered by the actor-chorus are frequently drowned out by on-stage musician Oğuz Kaplangi - also composer). Over-intellectualised and under-Marxed.
• At Royal Lyceum, Edinburgh, until 21 March
