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Rainbow Kiss Simon Farquhar's Rainbow Kiss is very much a first play, but that's by no means to wish either the script, or its Scottish author, ill. That much is especially true of a work that has arrived in an ace Royal Court production from actor-turned-director Richard Wilson (Primo) who is rapidly becoming London's go-to guy when it comes to new writing. Sure, various lines, exchanges, and even an entire plot strand sound borrowed or old hat, but, as seen at the final preview, Wilson's four-person cast were already playing together with the confidence and comfort of a long-time ensemble: such collective ease, in theatrical terms, represents its own very real kiss. A come-hither smile at an Aberdeen nightspot has led to the return to a council flat located 15 floors above the Scottish city of Keith (Joe McFadden), the flat's occupant, and the sexually avid Shazza (Dawn Steele), whose attitudes would seem to be every bit as funky and free-wheeling as her name. The flat is cold (and, in Dick Bird's design, seems it), but Shazza and Keith attempt to generate some heat, notwithstanding personal circumstances on both sides that would threaten to douse even the most combustibly erotic fire. Keith is looking after a baby boy, Simon, whose occupancy of the bedroom restricts all carnality to the couch, and it doesn't help that the boy's mother has evidently been declared mentally unwell. Shazza, in turn, rolls a joint with the same carefree brio with which she approaches sex—an attitude that would work perfectly well if minister's son Keith hadn't become more than smitten by his pick-up. For Shazza, it seems, one shag is as good as another, and they're all tempered by the fact that she is—no surprise here—already attached. Keith, by contrast, is an unhappily single, movie-loving romantic whose affections exist to be betrayed. It's scarcely accidental that the film noir classic Double Indemnity is invoked more than once: Keith takes his passions seriously—way too seriously, as it turns out—and will pay a brutal price for that intensity by the time the sixth and final scene has run its course. All such plays need a confidante, and Rainbow Kiss offers up a good one in Murdo (Clive Russell), Keith's neighbour, who is in every way larger than life even while careering towards death. Ailing both physically and emotionally (his only sexual release is with whores), Murdo joins Keith in what they jokingly call "the mutual desperation society," except that the phrase turns out to be no laughing matter. Russell, impossibly tall, is also unsurpassably good in a part requiring him to deliver a sacking-of-Santa-Claus narrative that is by no means new. But as is the way of Wilson's entire production, even the more overfamiliar components of the writing are delivered up afresh by a cast who exhibit the abiding paradox of great acting: they make it look like life. The play's quartet is completed by Scobie (Graham McTavish), a money-lender who isn't above casual brutality when it comes to settling his debts. Suffice it to say that his arrival offers a frisson of which James M. Cain would have been proud—enough so that one politely overlooks Murdo's subsequent remark to Keith that Scobie is "a walking horror film," an assessment we have already figured out for ourselves. Farquhar is better at comic asides—Keith lets slip that he doesn't read the Bible because he "can't get on with the main character"—than at thematic and emotional underscoring. That the play works, and then some, is due to the absolute integrity of a production that could have degenerated into the stale Royal Court son-of-Saved camp—indeed, it was initially titled Fuck Off—but instead beats to its own bruising heart as blessed by a company of four. McFadden's last few gigs in the Old Vic Aladdin and the Chichester Festival Theatre revival of How To Succeed ... were so sprightly and sweet that his surrender to the grim demands of this part seems doubly impressive. Steele is little short of sensational as a good-time gal who is all too aware of the bad times life throws up. And her final gesture—not to be revealed here—seems at once ruthless and absolutely right, her ticket to a future whose success or failure one can only guess. Rainbow Kiss From here |