Multinationals rule the waves?

10 April 2012

Last month's terrorist atrocities in America have served to give Gagarin Way, which won high praise at its Edinburgh Festival fringe premiere, an oddly dated, almost historic air.

This black depression of a political comedy by Gregory Burke conveys a bitter sense of political and social nihilism. It views a bare, new world, deprived of the bulwarks of socialism and communism, and living unjustly under the capricious sway of global capitalism, while multi-national corporations rule the waves. But since 11 September a new political spirit has been abroad.

Gagarin Way speaks, then, about the pre-September world order. It's set - and powerfully acted - in the storeroom of a multi-national factory in some Fife town, where a street is named after the Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin. But Neil Warmington's dull stage design, with packing cases and little else, gives no impression of the depression and decline that infests this Scottish terrain where radicalism's spirit is quenched. Here Michael Nardone's Eddie, an anarchist psychopath, is poised, in a rather clichéd tradition, to kidnap and kill a visiting multi-national consultant.

There's ample theatrical compensation for the derivative format and lack of suspense in John Tiffany's not very taut, though bloodthirsty and sadistic production. For the vehicle of Burke's political despair is a sharp verbal flair, a scathing wit and dark humour. Nardone's temper-amental factory psychopath is no ordinary thug.

He's well read and intelligent, eager to argue over existentialism, Sartre and Jean Genet. Gagarin Way, though, is a situation comedy as well as a verbal one. The heist is botched in a gruesome finale that confirms the political uselessness of Eddie's anarchic act. Michael Moreland's pathetically terrified security guard, a dim, young politics graduate who can't understand politics, unwittingly intrudes. The Marxist accomplice loses his nerve.

The multi-national executive, superlatively played with an air of crumpled, world-weary sadness by Maurice Roeves, proves an utterly inappropriate victim. But Burke's eloquent demonstration of anarchism's futility seems, in the dark light of 11 September, to have lost some of its sting.

Gagarin Way

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