If history had taken a different course, Ewan McGregor might well have been starring in this production. "The first theatre to move me," he says on a fund-raising leaflet for the place whose boards he trod in pre-Trainspotting days.
The twists and turns of history is the subject of this new play by Ian Brown, set in Perth in 1437, days after the murder of King James I of Scotland.
A troupe of actors from the Royal company have travelled from Edinburgh to Perth to perform for the king. With the loss of their patron, the players have to find a new play, and fast, to pull in crowds despite a period of mourning and the onset of Lent. They decide upon a life of the king, and their rehearsals of key scenes form the biography-in-flashback structure of the play.
This structure might have worked better without the accompanying emphasis on bawdy farce. You can see the gags approaching without having to climb up into a watchtower; any serious intent to look at the nature of power is reduced to little more than a pantomime romp through Scottish history.
The company leader splits his trousers, at crotch level of course, only to have them attended to by one saucy maid, Jinty. Just as she is on her knees, the rest of the gang troop in and, do you know, they don't believe she has sewing on her mind. Boom boom!
Strip away the farce and there are some good things here, however. Brown has a knack for dialogue in lively Scots, and is able to bring history to life in the strongest scenes. In one of the simplest and least rompy, those who died in an inter-clan battle provide moving testimony: "I did my duty and died" each says. Their words build up into a litany of lives lost and, uniquely in the play, raise the question: "For what?"
The cast do their best to be engaging, with Ann Scott Jones as Phemy and Lorraine McGowan as Jinty shining despite the sometimes wooden gags. And the audience lap up jokes about their despised neighbours. "Blood, death, atrocity? Sounds like Dundee," was savoured, as was "Noisy neighbours, the English."
Those who recognised the Shakespearean lines, cheekily included in 1437-time, more than a century before they were written, chortled away smugly.
Other than these smiles, you wonder what an audience might take away from the play on the issues it touches upon: power, politics and how individuals relate to both. Little, one suspects, though the fact that James I died in a drain in Perth was well established by the end. Historically this might be fascinating, but dramatically we are left wanting and oddly unmoved.
Until November 25. Box office: 01738 621031.
