"Tally's Blood" was the unpleasant nickname Scots gave the raspberry sauce that Italian ice-cream-makers put on their produce. In Ann Marie di Mambro's drama, it is also a reference to the suffering of the Scots-Italian community during the second world war.
The play centres on the cafe of Massimo and Rosinella Pedreschi. The couple are childless, but are bringing up Lucia, the daughter of Rosinella's dead sister. As Italy enters the war on Germany's side, the cafe is ransacked by a mob. Massimo is arrested as an enemy alien and interned in Canada for four years. This shameful episode from Scotland's history is too little discussed. It is also so inherently dramatic that it seems ready-made for the stage. Which is why the many shortcomings of Di Mambro's play are so bitterly disappointing.
Although the centre of the drama is the events of wartime, it actually spans some 20 years, from the Pedreschis leaving Italy with Lucia in 1936 to an unusual reunion some 11 years after the war. This creates an immense structural weakness at the heart of the play. While the first act follows the characters' lives before and during the conflict, the second indulges in increasingly irrelevant family affairs.
From the opening scene in which Lucia stands on a table showing off her Judy Garland dress, one believes that TV writer Di Mambro is going to give us an easy ride. In fact, from fraught childhood relations to a custody battle and parental interference in budding young romance, the impossibly overloaded script seems like several episodes of a soap opera rolled into one. There is little space for character development, and the terrible events of the war become almost a footnote.
The personal dramas, such as the fate of Massimo's brother Franco (who joins the British army) and the tragedy of his sweetheart, are predictable. The saccharine humour of the piece repeatedly drags us away from any serious consideration of the persecution of Scots-Italians during the war. There is a great play to be written about this subject, but Tally's Blood is not it.
· Until March 15. Box office: 01334 475 000. Then touring.
