Peter Arnott has written enough plays to know you’re not supposed to structure them like this. The conventional way to tell the story of the rail bridge disaster of 1879, when 75 people lost their lives on the crossing from Wormit to Dundee, would be to dramatise the facts of the case: engineer Sir Thomas Bouch, the grieving relatives, the public enquiry and the compellingly terrible poem by William McGonagall. (“It must have been an awful sight / To witness in the dusky moonlight.”) Arnott has none of that. Instead, he imagines a kind of ghost-train-in-waiting and presents a sequence of vignettes about passengers who have nothing in common but their fate. By rights, such a theatrical collage could come across as fragmentary, but he pulls it off brilliantly thanks to vivid writing, political nous and thematic unity.
As is the nature of journeys, the passengers are in transition, changing jobs, beginning new lives, reinventing themselves, and yet already they seem stalked by death. They’re like a congregation reflecting on the journey of life, with Dundee as heaven and the Tay as a watery purgatory.
The journey is made smooth by Andrew Panton’s excellent production, kicking off a double-anniversary season to mark 80 years of the theatre and 20 years of the permanent ensemble. With strong performances all around, the cast seem to haunt the broken carriage of designer Emily James’s rotating set as it mutates into pubs, classrooms and tenements with dream-like fluidity. Simon Wilkinson’s ominous lighting and MJ McCarthy’s rib-shaking sound design build to the closing moments when the inevitable ending gives shape and force to Arnott’s adventurous structure.
• At Dundee Rep until 21 September.
