Theatre:
Six Black Candles, Royal Lyceum, Edinburgh. 3/5 stars.
IT is easy to understand both why Des Dillon's tale of his sister's revenge seance has gathered dust for the past six years - and why the Lyceum's new director, Mark Thomson, has decided to dust it off.
Frankly Six Black Candles is barely a play at all. Before the curtain goes up, Caroline (Kath Howden) is pining for the no-good Bobby, who has deserted her for the unseen babysitter, Stacey. By the end, after much farcical to-ing and fro-ing by her five diverse siblings with the paraphernalia of the occult and at the expense of a young priest (Mark McDonnell), she has arranged to meet the scoundrel outside Asda.
No-one goes on any sort of a journey during the piece and nothing has been worked out by then end of its two hours. Nothing really happens, and not in a profound Beckettian way either. It is an extended sketch with no real punchline, a shaggy dog story.
At his last billet, at the Brunton Theatre in Musselburgh, Thomson staged his own scripts during the Edinburgh Fringe, appropriate pieces of accessible theatre that were much better constructed as drama than Dillon's script is here.
It does, however, have some great dialogue and some very funny, if not exactly witty, exchanges. The eight women on stage and two men (both victims, naturally) make the most of them all and, frankly, it doesn't look terribly hard work for any of them. Absolutely no effort is required of the audience either.
It would be po-faced in the extreme to complain that this is all a waste of resources, and particularly the talents of Eileen McCallum, Gabriel Quigley, Julie Duncanson and Jennifer Black, who have the best of it. It is at least debatable, however, whether it should be any part of the subsidised theatre.
Productions at Glasgow's Pavilion are operating in much the same area. It is also worth pointing out that if it had been staged during Edinburgh's hothouse August, its blasphemous tone would almost certainly have guaranteed it the front page of the Evening News
and condemnation from some Roman Catholic city councillor
who hadn't seen it.
Six Black Candles should not, however, need that sort of assistance to sell tickets. Seeing a posse of our finest actresses having fun is a treat that no-one should miss. Just don't expect food for thought.
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