Robert Dawson Scott at the Assembly @ St George’s West
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Gentlemen, good news: it’s OK to be a guy again. You can stop getting in touch with your feminine side, hugging trees or pretending to like Meg Ryan movies. Equally, you don’t have go big-game fishing with Hemingway or ride the range like John Wayne. You can just be you. In fact, the final number in this amusing, warm-hearted show, already a huge hit in Australia from whence it hails, says we should blame all the male angst of the past 50 years on Wayne, who just took the macho stuff a bit too far.
If it’s sophisticated social analysis or high art you are looking for, look elsewhere. Scott Rankin and Glynn Nicholas’s play, with a few songs thrown in for good measure, is simply rattling good entertainment.
Three businessmen, each stressed out with their own collection of modern-day male neuroses, from commitment-phobia to a pathologically roving eye, are taken by their boss to a luxury resort. The implied threat is that one of them is going to be “let go”. In fact it is the boss who is going to let himself go. His parting gift to his team is to get them to recognise how, in their different ways, they are shutting down huge parts of themselves, as he did, and to persuade them not to make the same mistake. I defy any modern man not to recognise moments of madness of their own here, and I daresay that most women will end up rather more sympathetic to their menfolk by the end as well.
This is all done with wit and vigour and there are more than a few home truths thrown in. The presentation is skilfully realised too, miming all the props and furniture on a bare stage but in a way that has evidently been carefully rehearsed and which, as they perch on nonexistent bar-stools or run across imaginary rope bridges, generates its fair share of the laughter. The excellent cast of four includes both Nicholas himself and Les Dennis, whose rehabilitation clearly continues apace. He has his vaudevillian moments, and he can sing a bit as well, but actually he is at his best and most affecting when he is playing it for real. The same is true of the rest of them; one of the few weak moments came when the four of them started to enjoy it just a bit too much and momentarily lost their discipline.
But that’s easily fixed.
Box office: 0131-623 3030. To Aug 27
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