Andrew Neil: Life

Hampstead Authors Society Books and Reviews

Scottish All-That-Jazz: Life by Andrew Neil

All that jazz, in shorthand a.k.a. 'life', bursts alive on the stage and, more significantly, in your heart, in Andrew Neil's new play, Life. Douglas Fraser, a Jewish Scotsman from a mining village, is a song-and-dance man - well, at least in his dreams, more precisely, on his deathbed. Too late for him, no doubt. But perhaps not so for us, the audience, watching his last minute eureka, providing us with what cathartic theatre does best at its best: insight by proxy.

The moment of truth hits him as the industrial suppository and most of the final protagonists in his life impose on his body and soul, respectively: his various wives, children, lovers and the supporting 'actors' in his final stage appearance - the nurses. As the puzzle comes together piece by piece, visitor by visitor, Fraser's life grasps for its painful coherence of missed opportunities, messed up loves, entangled relationships.

But this is no cold, distanced dissection of a not uncommonly shambolic attempt to live a full life. Through the economical dialogues, each visitor peels off yet another layer of Fraser's rich yet, in the end, unsatisfying life. The voices are written and acted with disarming authenticity. Irony and vulnerability oscillates.

You'd like to experience the rare privilege of laughing while struggling with the tears of recognition of what it is to be human - so frail yet so strong? If so, this is the show to go to.

Sensitively and sensibly cast and directed by Jane Rutherford, the Scottish Beat Theatre ensemble delivers a case study of how the deceptively simple becomes convincingly complex if all the participants are pulling together, seriously committed.

When the lights went on, I noticed, through my tears, others in the audience wiping off theirs. I dare you not to smile and cry during the final song-and-dance.