Theatre reviews: Snake in the Grass | So Long Wee Moon & more

So Long Wee Moon, Loaningdale Arts Centre, Biggar ★★★★

Treasure Island, Cumbernauld Theatre at Lanternhouse ★★★★

We hear more than we used to, these days, about male violence against women and girls; physical, sexual, or purely psychological. Back in the day, though – when the public silence on these subjects was almost absolute – the pressures women suffered could sometimes, and suddenly, turn them into raging furies; and here are two powerful plays featuring that kind of explosive domestic drama.

Alan Ayckbourn’s 2002 play Snake In The Grass takes place over 24 hours in a neglected garden setting, and chronicles what happens when older sister Annabelle returns to claim her late father’s estate, which has been left to her in its entirety. Resident in the house is her younger sister Miriam, who has cared for the old man for decades while Annabelle travelled the world. Also present is Alice, the old man’s nurse, still hanging around and attempting a spot of blackmail. At first the play is all wry Ayckbourn wit and accurate characterisation, as the estranged sisters spar and reconcile, while trying to deal with Alice.

During the second of the play’s three scenes, though, it takes a disturbing lurch towards the macabre; and by the end, a few dizzying twists in the plot, and Ayckbourn’s willingness to toy with the supernatural, leave us feeling both thrilled, and well and truly deceived. Andrew Panton’s production is flawless, Jen McGinley’s set a thing of sinister beauty, and all the handbrake turns in the drama are brilliantly handled by a superb Dundee Rep cast, featuring Ann Louise Ross as Alice, Emily Winter as Miriam, and a perfectly pitched Deirdre Davis as Annabelle.

In So Long Wee Moon – a second production from new Scots language company Braw Clan – we encounter terrifying 1920s Clydesdale matriarch Annie Gibbs, who rules her two daughters, Nancy, 17 and Wee Moon, 12, with a rod of iron. If we listen well to Martin Travers’s powerful text, we soon begin to glimpse the reasons for a life turned hard and bitter, first by Nancy’s birth out of wedlock, and then by an impoverished early widowhood. The play tells how Nancy escapes Annie’s house for life as an actress, only to return five years later, glamorous but broken by failure yet still in an extraordinary act of sisterly self-sacrifice able to offer a chance of escape to Wee Moon.

The story is intensely dramatic, in other words; but handled with terrific panache and intensity, in just 60 minutes, by Helen McAlpine as Annie, Chiara Sparkes as Nancy and Morven Blackadder as Wee Moon. The play emerges as a gripping family drama told in the language it demands, in a country where – well within living memory – there was barely a family that didn’t have its own Annie Gibbs, striving to pass on the strait-laced misery of her own life to all the generations to come.

And there’s also time, this week, to wish bon voyage to Ross McKay’s gorgeous and thoughtful version of Treasure Island, first seen at Cumbernauld last Christmas, has been revived for a Scotland-wide tour. Like So Long Wee Moon, this Treasure Island is all about the power of the imagination to change lives, including that of its troubled young hero Robbie, a latter-day Robert Louis Stevenson; and With fine songs and music by Oguz Kaplangi, a passionate and touching take on Stevenson’s famous story and four excellent performances from Megan McGuire, Simon Donaldson, Stephanie McGaraidh and Anthony O’Neill, the show returns to harbour in fine style, bearing pearls of wisdom far more valuable than all the gold in Captain Flint’s chest.

Snake In The Grass is at Dundee Rep until 5 October. So Long Wee Moon is on tour until 28 September. Treasure Island is on tour until 19 October