A husband and wife are hunched over the kitchen table fretting about the family finances. This is 1977, an era of turbulent economics, and the couple’s prospects are bleak. It could be a scene of high melodrama, except at the other side of their tenement flat they’re being upstaged by a figure of comic excess. Her grey hair is long and lank, her bow-legged gait rocks her from side to side and her toothless diction is untroubled by consonants. She is 100 years old, has an insatiable appetite and right now is licking the icing off the top of a cake.
This is the voracious granny in Roberto Cossa’s La Nona, an Argentinian comedy relocated in Douglas Maxwell’s very funny adaptation to a Scotland of turf wars, brutalist architecture and the Queen’s silver jubilee. Played by Gregor Fisher and as lovably grotesque as his Rab C Nesbitt, she is literally eating the family out of house and home, yet commands their respect and affection.
She is also a symbol of rampant consumerism. The more Jonathan Watson’s proto-Thatcherite Cammy tries to galvanise Paul Riley as his indolent brother, Louise McCarthy as his nice-but-dim daughter, Maureen Beattie as his head-screwed-on wife and Barbara Rafferty as a maiden aunt straight out of a Tennessee Williams play, the more this granny feeds off their efforts.
For all their values of hard work and entrepreneurship, the system is weighted against them. She is the dark heart of this broadest of sitcoms. It would have been nice, in Graham McLaren’s National Theatre of Scotland production, to have one more scene with Fisher in the spotlight, but that doesn’t diminish the comic impact of a string of superb turns, from Brian Pettifer as the neighbour who’s all libido and no legs to Rafferty’s Aunt Angela on speed.
• At King’s theatre, Edinburgh, until 6 June. Box office: 0131-529 6000. Then touring until 4 July.
