AS WE are now learning – fast, painfully and all over again – economic depressions leave scars that last for generations; and it's perhaps significant that this year's spring theatre season opens with two major plays set in the aftermath of crushin
g economic disaster.
It's the collapse of British heavy industry in the 1980s that shapes the imaginary community of Dalgarnock in Ayrshire, where the hero of Andrew O'Hagan's fine novel Be Near Me – now adapted for the National Theatre of Scotland by the actor and writer Ian McDiarmid – works as a Catholic priest.
As his parishioners are not slow to tell him, the place is "an unemployment blackspot"; and many of the people have little left in their lives beyond the old, sectarian tribalism of a community thrown roughly together by a traumatic industrial revolution, and then left high and dry by economic change.
But Father Anderton is not the man to bring healing to this damaged place – he is himself in flight, using the church as a "beautiful refuge" from a youthful tragedy in which, 40 years ago at Oxford, he lost the love of his life, a beautiful working-class hero called Conor. Posh, Anglicised, and full of high-camp preciousness about fine wines and fine music, he is both helplessly tempted by the faint echo of Conor he senses in a cheeky Dalgarnock boy called Mark, and constantly vulnerable to the rumbling class and cultural resentment of the town. And so the scene is set for something of a tragedy.
McDiarmid's stage version of Be Near Me is nothing like a perfect stage version of the story. The whole cadence of the novel represents a falling-off from the brief glimpse of joy and completeness contained in Anderton's youthful relationship with Conor; yet that relationship is neither conjured up on stage nor fully described in the script. Instead, what we see is a high-class, two-act illustrated monologue, in which McDiarmid's pinched, camp and self-mocking Anderton often stands centre stage, musing, while the other characters move around his troubled mind; and – in the background – the townsfolk sing their way through a series of republican or loyalist chants.
If there's a sense that the book is not fully developed into a play, though, there's also some terrific acting on view, not least from a superb Blythe Duff as Anderton's clever and disappointed housekeeper, Mrs Poole. Director John Tiffany and his designer, Peter McKintosh, create some bleak and memorable stage pictures, notably in the climactic courtroom scene.
And although it's difficult to see what audiences in England will gain from this show, it's the kind of work that Scotland itself urgently needs to see and debate – if only because it seeks, at last, to create some real dynamism around the discussion of a wounded and damaged part of Scotland's story that many, even today, would rather ignore.
Arthur Miller's 1944 play The Man Who Had All The Luck – revived in a strong and interesting production by John Dove – was written in the aftermath of the Great Depression of the 1930s, and also touches on ideas about the dignity of labour. The play's hero, a young car mechanic called David Beeves, is a lucky guy, whose business just grows and grows. What torments him is his own uncertainty about whether he has earned his good fortune through hard work and common sense, or whether he is really just fortune's fool, like all the losers he sees around him.
The basic question about chance and free will is unresolvable, of course. But it's particularly interesting, in the week of Barack Obama's inauguration as the president of the United States, to be reminded of how a core belief in hard work and the just dividends it pays remains central to the American Dream.
The finest dialogue in the play is between the tormented Beeves – played with passion by Philip Cumbus – and his Austrian-born colleague Gus, an excellent Greg Powrie, who is shocked to see any American succumbing to the superstitious idea that he has "done too well". That kind of thinking, he says, is for the old world – or, we might add, for places like Dalgarnock, where the best and brightest often left, to pursue American dreams of their own.
At the Citizens', meanwhile, the brilliant site-specific theatre-maker David Leddy offers us a sharp, bitter and haunting reminder of a Victorian world in which human life was discarded as lightly as any other cheap commodity. Set in the Citizens' Theatre when it first opened, at the turn of the 1880s, Sub Rosa makes brilliant use of the building's backstage and hidden spaces – from the dusty places under the main stage to the shabby glamour of the old upper circle – to tell the story in five monologues of its unseen heroine, a music-hall singer called Flora McIvor, and her doomed attempt to free the theatre's artists from the rule of their sadistic manager, Hunter.
There's a magnificent feast of Scottish acting on view here, as stars including Alison Peebles, Finlay Welsh and Louise Ludgate glitter like cracked diamonds against the dusty dark, and the visual and aural effects are often stunning. And as for what it says – well, we are accustomed to the idea that human life is cheap. But it's a reality with which most of us in this country no longer have to live, from day to day; and for that at least, in the flawed Scotland of 2009, we can perhaps be grateful.
• Be Near Me is at the Donmar Warehouse, London, until 14 March, and then on tour to Glasgow, Inverness, Edinburgh and Perth. The Man Who Had All The Luck is at the Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh, until 14 February. Sub Rosa is at the Citizens' Theatre, Glasgow, until 31 January.
