Edges and angles: Julie Brown shines in Double Nugget Pic: John Johnston
The tiny theatre company Random Accomplice has been the vehicle for the rise and rise of Johnny McKnight, evidently one of the more brilliant shooting stars of his theatrical generation. But behind every successful man, they say, there is a woman and in McKnight’s case that woman is his long term accomplice and co-founder of the company, Julie Brown. Indeed it might be safer to say beside rather than behind.
Double Nugget gives Ms Brown the chance to shine on her own account for although both the short plays which make up the programme were written by McKnight, she has directed both and stars in one.
The first, Mary Massacre, is the sad tale of two women of a certain age both unlucky in love (one married, the other not – being unlucky in love is no respecter of formal relationships) who end up pursuing the same man. Not surprisingly, in these linked in times, internet dating is the culprit as Leyla signs on to toomanyfish.com only to find herself pursuing Jenny’s husband. Julie Wilson Nimmo and Mary Gapinksi tell their stories separately, though there is an entertaining exchange in an Argos store when Wilson Nimmo briefly becomes the kind of gum chewing harridan we have all encountered.
Gradually, the stories begin to intersect leaving them both holding the candyfloss at the Ayr fair. Much of the fun comes from the gossipy asides of the two virtual monologues, full of the kind of camp detail that McKnight adores, both appalling and hilarious at the same time. Gapinski and Wilson NImmo give it full value.
It is, however, the second piece, Seven Year Itch, more archly structured but more interesting as a result, which really catches the eye. It is based on a bizarre incident in Chicago where two office workers loathed each other so much that one eventually murdered the other on the premises (in a Gothic twist, it was a funeral parlour) and hid her body in the ceiling space.
But instead of a routine re-telling of the story, spiced up by facts that the woman in question was a fundamentalist Christian and the man gay, McKnight deconstructs the story altogether, relocates it to a non-descript Scottish office and has two co-workers act out, with a great deal of larky theatrical in-jokery, what might have happened between them.
It sounds an odd way to approach such a grim subject but here’s where Brown comes in, finding a performance style which perfectly complements the writing but never loses sight of the macabre undertow. Here she and Martin McCormick play the two office workers , occasionally appealing to Dolly Parton as an agreed supreme being to avoid any possible offence. Brown just is funny, all angles and edges, somewhere in the tradition of Joyce Grenfell or even Miranda Hart. But she is clearly a lot more than that, handling what could have been an uneasy mixture with great aplomb, allowing us to laugh freely in the build up but still leaving us with a strange hangover at the end.
Touring extensively across Scotland until March 10. Details at Random Accomplice's web site
