Theatre review: McAdam’s Torment - Oran Mor, Glasgow

IF SCOTLAND in the 18th century was a nation torn between dawning enlightenment and a lingering fear of its own barbarism, then no story came to represent that tension more clearly than the terrible tale of Sawney Bean, the thief, murderer and cannibal who, two centuries earlier, was said to have terrorised the Galloway coastline, along with his cave-dwelling gang of family and associates.

This new monologue-with-music by Dublin writer Audrey Devereux – presented as part of a two-play exchange between Oran Mor and Bewlay’s Lunchtime Theatre in Dublin – is a passionate and shapely retelling of the story, as seen from the point of view of a well-to-do lawyer, McAdam, who loses a favourite manservant to Bean’s ravages, and is left with a sense of horror, and of self-disgust at his own failure to take revenge, that will haunt him for the rest of his life.

Paul Cunningham, in superb form, plays McAdam at the end of his life, recalling the terrible experience that still torments him; and if the style of the monologue is a shade stately and quaint, in a conventional period manner, and sometimes a little repetitive, the narrative is lifted and shaped, in Graham Eatough’s production, by a creative and complex use of the figure of the fiddle-playing musician.

In this shape-shifting role, Rab Handleigh morphs powerfully through the show from doomed manservant, to a series of innkeepers, to the looming figure of Bean himself, while knocking out a jagged series of accompanying sounds and tunes of his own devising. With both leading actor and violin heavily miked, the show becomes an interesting duet of music and language, punctuated by the sharp or laboured sound of human breath; and although Devereux’s play finally adds little to our knowledge of this notorious tale, it tells it well, and with commendable style.

Rating: ***