Rainbow Kiss ( Archived )

Reviews

Sex and violence in the granite city

The Guardian, Michael Billington, 12 April 2006

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Aberdeen, says Bill Bryson in Notes from a Small Island, suffers from a “surfeit of innocuousness.” That’s certainly not the impression given by Simon Farquhar in his dazzling Royal Court debut. For him the granite city is a place of drug dependency, child prostitution, financial extortion and individual depression. “Nocuous” might be the word for it.

Farquhar’s focus is on the tortured psyche of his hero, Keith. Although a graduate in English, he’s got a dead-end job with directory enquiries and lives in a high-rise flat looking after his eight-month old baby as his wife has been institutionalised. So when Keith picks up a snazzy beautician called Shazza, he is looking for a long-term relationship. The problem is that Shazza, who lives in a posh part of town apparently with a drug dealer, just wants a bit of casual sex.

This is the play’s first salutary shock. Farquhar describes a contemporary role-reversal in which it is the man who suffers the pangs of despised love while the woman is after a one-night stand. Farquhar subtly pins down the narcissism of romantic agony by showing Keith investing his partner with his own qualities. But what makes the play so impressive is Farquhars portrait of the grimness behind Aberdeen’s oil-fuelled boom. Keith’s only chum is a suicidal former railway man called Murdo, while his flat is periodically invaded by an axe-wielding, face-disfiguring debt-collector.

There are a few loose ends in Farquhar’s narrative. But he vividly captures the monomaniac quality of sexual jealousy and his dialogue is often caustically funny. Noting that Keith’s TV set has gone, the defiantly Scottish Murdo claims: “Well youre not missin much, fuckin shite they beam off fi down South on that thing.” Richard Wilson’s Theatre Upstairs production brilliantly conveys the plays mixture of visceral excitement and spiritual despair.

Joe McFadden’s Keith has the tousled innocence of an Aberdonian Peter Pan caught up in a world of adult responsibility, and Dawn Steele’s Shazza exudes the randy heartlessness of an upwardly mobile working-class girl. Clive Russell toweringly embodies Murdo’s sizzled horror at the City’s descent into the moral depths, and Graham McTavish is truly terrifying as the invasive money-lender. But this is not just another sex ‘n’ violence play: what it grippingly shows is the disastrous effect of a money-mad materialist culture on society’s marginalised no-hopers.

Benedict Nightingale, Times 2, 12 April 2006

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Can you imagine anything worse than spending December on the 15th floor of one of Aberdeen’s grottier tower-blocks with the teething baby your partner left you before going mad? You can if youre Joe McFaddens Keith, the forlorn young protagonist of Simon Farquahr’s arresting first play.

Out there, striding past the seven-year-old who offers fellatio in the lift, is the loan shark who enjoys slashing the faces of people who, like Keith, don’t pay their debts. Worse, there’s Dawn Steele’s Shazza, a promiscuous pick-up with the power to obsess loners and turn them dangerously vindictive and/or suicidal.

Mark you, this isn’t what Richard Wilson’s production initially leads you to expect. The play opens with a graphic sexual encounter: Steeles smiling yet aloof Shazza wanting an anonymous quickie, Keith anxious for talk and relating, and not for the only time in the play, the traditional gender attitudes reversed. But Farquhar’s admission in the published text that he meant to call the play F3 stars Off, and his dedication of it to “the ones who f3 stars us up,” isn’t just four-letter braggadocio. Through there’s much dry humour in Rainbow Kiss, it’s a troubling place.

Maybe the play is also an example of that enervating genre, Victim Drama. Why must McFadden’s Keith, who is an articulate, affable and not unattractive university graduate, toil in a BT call centre? Why does he find girlfriends so hard to get? Yet Farquhar’s writing is strong enough to bounce you into believing what he wants, up to the point when a half-crazed Keith tries to bribe Graham McTavish’s heavy to maim Steele’s uncaring Shazza. And lets remember that the most famous underachieving graduate our theatre has produced in the past 50 years was also accused of passivity.

Farquhar’s anti-hero is less raucous than Osbourne’s Jimmy Porter, but her shares his happiness and hopelessness. This justifies McFadden’s failure to bring overt intensity to Keith’s self-destructive preoccupation with Shazza.

Life has paralysed him, as it has his equally lonely neighbour, Clive Russell’s drolly lugubrious Murdo, who enters the play having been sacked as Santa for swearing at a noxious kid and leaves it having made a failed suicide attempt. Clearly SAD has debilitated Aberdeen or maybe its a sad place anyway. I’m not visiting it next Yuletide.