While a land of cakes sounds yummy, the subtitle of poet Don Paterson's first play, A Dundee Melodrama, is rather less alluring. But Paterson is not aiming to revive the fortunes of the genre associated with Victorian sensationalism. Instead, he says, the play is "a drama of melodies", in collaboration with composer Gordon McPherson.
Set in a psychiatric ward in a large hospital, the play explores what happens when you wake one day and find you've lost your own "narrator". This is how Paterson describes mental illness through his narrator, Archie, who opens the show with a bit of stand-up, a "post-modern soliloquy" about Dundee and mental illness.
It's funny, knowing, and sharp. Archie then joins the cast as one of the patients for a first act of almost unbearable lightness. Played for laughs, it's like a psychiatric sitcom in which nobody is really mad - Archie gets admitted to escape his bingo-crazed wife, Davie is obsessed with sheds, and Christopher seems only to be recovering from his doctoral thesis, Tremulous Icons. There's a guy called Dog who is really called Sandra, a woman who takes refuge in the laundry cupboard and Mary who we know will be bad because of the shadows under her eyes and her very manic knitting.
The second act twists into something much darker, and it's here that the melodies begin to do their work. The patients stage a talent contest, Funny Turns. Plot-wise this feels clichéd, with the challenge to put the show on against all the odds. But the cosiness of the first half does finally unravel as each character's past and present troubles are revealed in a moment of crisis.
There is some beautiful writing here, especially during the funny turns that couldn't be more tragic, and impressive performances from the whole cast. Davie, doing stand-up in a clown's suit and Trevor Horn's Buggles specs, loses his punchlines as a childhood memory of finding his mother and uncle together surfaces.
But there is too much jovial camaraderie early on, too much comfortable populism, for this play to either offer much insight into mental illness or to be a great drama about it. To have characters making jokes about psychosis or obsessive compulsive disorder without showing any symptoms or drugged-up misery as they sunnily live out their institutional lives, is one thing. To have them reveal their damaged backgrounds in the final moments feels manipulative; the dramatic equivalent of having your cake and eating it.
Until March 24. Box office: 01382 223530.
