Theatre reviews: I Can Die Too | Fever Dreams

I Can Die Too, Pitlochry Festival Theatre ★★★

Fever Dreams, Leith Depot ★★★

It’s a bit of a fever-dream about rehearsing a play, says singer, songwriter and West End stage star Frances Ruffelle of her new cabaret-theatre show I Can Die Too. The show opened at Pitlochry Festival Theatre last week, in a co-production with Love Child/ Evan Sacks and Les Theatres de la Ville de Luxembourg; and Ruffelle certainly generates some fierce theatrical heat, in this story about a modern actress’s rebellion against the script of Jean Cocteau’s 1930 monologue The Human Voice, which she is trying to rehearse.

Cocteau’s play tells the story of a long-term mistress who spends the night by the telephone in a series of snatched and heartbroken conversations with her lover, who is about to marry a younger woman, and erase his old love from his life.

Ruffelle’s actress heroine, though, finds herself enraged by the character’s passivity and submissiveness; and while drinking far too much, and generally driving her director James to distraction, Lily begins to respond by telling her own story, of a baby daughter lost to adoption in her teenage years, and of the pain and emotional damage that continues to haunt her life, 30 years on.

With two dramaturgs and three writers credited - Frances Ruffelle plus Sally George and Pitlochry director Alan Cumming - the script of I Can Die Too still seems slightly underwritten, without a trace of poetry or real lyrical strength. What the show lacks in forceful writing, though, it offers in full in the strength and subtlety of its nine original songs, written by Ruffelle with 11 other composer-musicians, and powerfully arranged and presented by onstage musical director Frew, with the show’s supporting actors - Stephen Ashfield as James, with Melinda Orengo, Flora Spencer-Longhurst and Maya Rugen - also doubling as his four-piece band.

Ruffelle delivers these songs with all the practised artistry and sheer stage magic of a performer with a lifetime of experience in expressing complex emotions through music. And Simon Kenny’s dazzling red-and-pink cabaret set, lit by Emma Chapman, offers a vivid and sometimes thrilling backdrop to the raw energy, emotion and wit of the songs; in a show that sometime falters when it tries to speak and narrate, but that sings straight from the heart, with a sizzling star quality that’s often irresistible.

READ MORE: Songbird Frances discovers a new voice

At the Leith Depot pub, meanwhile, Edinburgh writers’ group Penpals continue to present their bi-monthly Drama@theDepot evenings of short plays, performed script-in-hand by a team of professional actors. By coincidence, this hot month’s theme was Fever Dreams; and it produced six short 10-15 minute plays that ranged as widely in quality as they did in setting.

For my money, the most successful plays were those that stuck most closely to the theme. Carolyn Yates’s short dialogue Fever Dream - for a chronically embarrassed granddaughter, and a gran determined to pursue her dream of singing Peggy Lee’s Fever at a local karaoke night - was shapely and entertaining; Clare Cockburn’s File 69 was a stylish and nightmarish Hollywood Noir; and Scott Strom’s Shivers was a beautifully structured speculation - performed with impressive intensity by Philip Kingscott and Moj Taylor - on those strange impulses we sometimes feel to do something simple but absolutely drastic, and on the possible parallel realities in which we actually act on them.

Elsewhere, the evening wandered off into less dramatic reflections, for example on the ups and downs of becoming a weekend historical re-enactment enthusiast. All six plays, though, were performed with tremendous flair and skill by a joyfully witty acting team that also included Jasmin Gleeson and Nicola Jo Cully. And with excellent homemade cake available in the interval - an old Leith Village Theatre tradition still honoured by Penpals - a merry time was had by the whole 50-strong audience; crammed into the little side room of one of the most popular pubs on Leith Walk.

I Can Die Too is at Pitlochry Festival Theatre until 2 August; The next Drama@theDepot evening, on the theme Seven Deadly Sins, is at Leith Depot, Edinburgh, 21 September.

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