Iona Firouzabadi
posted 1 October 2007

Vanishing Point's Subway is a perfect piece of Edinburgh Fringe theatre: it manages to be both miniature and grand. It’s also an intriguing piece of Edinburgh theatre: evoking that city in both present and future incarnations, making it at once familiar and fantastical. Now transferred to the Studio at the Lyric Hammersmith, it brings with it the mist and the smoke, the vernacular speech and the architectural vernacular of that Celtic capital.

We begin in a pub in Hull in 2032, where an anonymous drinker has some advice for our youngish hero Scruggs – get to know your dad. Before it’s too late. Armed with this generic message, Scruggs sets out for his hometown of Edinburgh, and his neighbourhood – Leith Walk. Leith rises up before us in Victorian tenements and derelict tower blocks, in golden nostalgia and bitter future, all conjured in a tiny space by words, mime, music and a slight but beautiful set. Sandy Grierson plays Scruggs and Rosalind Sydney plays nearly everyone else. And then there’s a seven-piece Kosovan band, who with drums and strings and keys colour-in the cityscape and fill-out the emotions of the protagonists. The interaction between these nine performers shifts elegantly between the comic and the lyrical. Many a West End composer could learn something here about the interplay between character and music.

Told with wry wit, Scots inflections and performances of extraordinary verbal and physical richness, Subway is a story about how families don’t talk – about how a son may never really know his father. It’s also about a socialist-revolutionary uprising led by pensioners. And it’s about Scotland’s smoking ban. It delivers us into a vision of a strong state and free market that could be Margaret Thatcher’s wet dream. A vision where the poor of Leith wait with lottery tickets for admission to a heavenly hospital.

Yet despite being set in a dystopian Scottish future - where patronising, state-controlled drinks machines regulate your intake of Irn Bru - Subway is a remarkably warm and fuzzy play. It will make you smile like a child, though its feel-good vibe never strays into the Disney kingdoms of manipulation and mawkishness. Instead it tiptoes a fine and clever line along the edges of nostalgia, reconciliation and quixotic idealism.

Till 20 October 2007