The small flat above the chip shop is a stripped-down ruin of its start-of-play self: spaces gape where furniture stood. Charlie, a layabout composer manqué, reads aloud a newspaper summary of a controversial Play for Today. It is written by one of his kin and the plotline is a version of the drama careering to disaster before our eyes. Disgusted by the playwright’s “betrayal” of their family, failed fish-fryer Cammy snarls that his wife (for it is she) “struggles to resolve the themes of the piece in a dramaturgically satisfying manner”.
The fictional summary is, in fact, based on the very real play La Nona by Roberto Cossa. What we are watching is a new version of this 1977 black comedy. I haven’t seen Cossa’s original, but Cammy’s critical assessment nails Douglas Maxwell’s fitfully hilarious reworking for National Theatre of Scotland. The story of a working-class family destroyed by their insatiable 100-year-old Granny – who inexorably ingests every edible within reach – is relocated from Argentina to Glasgow. A strong first-half setup sags after the interval; situations and characters become too obviously manipulated. There are still laughs, but they amount to a collection of comic scraps rather than a riotous whole.
Still, if the dramaturgy is a fish short of the full supper, Graham McLaren’s direction is the essence of theatricality – distilled from Vsevolod Meyerhold and Dario Fo’s visions of popular theatre and from panto traditions. Maxwell’s dialogue is demotically delicious and his script provides the actors with material to develop salty, saucy, vinegar-sharp performances. Maureen Beattie is a sceptical grand-daughter-in-law, so drily laconic that the audience must roar with laughter to stabilise the balance of the universe; Barbara Rafferty is a Tennessee Williams-style dependent daughter exploded into speed-demented dealer. Each of the seven-strong cast is a brilliance of broad comedy, but Gregor Fisher, cross-dressed in the title role, is a thing apart – physically grotesque, part granny, part baby; mindlessly devouring as a virus or black hole. This is not a performance – it’s the manifestation of the verb “to consume” in almost human form: awesome.
