With this uneven three-hander, Kieran Hurley has fielded two plays in one. The first is a sex farce about a middle-aged man paying his first call to an enterprising Edinburgh brothel, his clumsiness compounded by misunderstandings that lead to his dressing in an outre ruffle ruche shirt and knocking over a sideboard display of dildos. A few more slamming doors and it would be Brian Rix.
The second is the kind of play you can imagine David Mamet writing, a serious drama in which a former pupil confronts a once-inspirational teacher about the sorry state of the world he has bequeathed her.
Either could have worked well – indeed, fitfully, each do – but together they are an awkward mix. In Roxana Silbert’s production, Zara (Dani Heron) clocks that the latest punter to book an appointment with her co-worker Jay (Anders Hayward) is none other than Mr Urquhart, her high-school English teacher (Conleth Hill). It is a funny scenario and Hurley gets a fair bit of mileage over the initial shock and subsequent prospect of either being found out, not least because Urquhart is a respected head of department and a married, supposedly heterosexual, man who insists he is “normal”.
But, if you’ll excuse the metaphor, Hurley can’t keep it up for ever and, once Zara has put the older man right about the economics of sex work in a capitalist system, the farce loses its energy. In its place, on a drearily realistic attic bedroom set designed by Anna Orton, he introduces a slowly paced investigation into how the teacher and his former star pupil ended up in a place neither of them feels proud of.
As Urquhart’s first experiment with gay sex founders, the playwright begins to develop an argument about parents failing their children and one generation letting down the next at a time when, economically and ecologically, present and future look bleak. There are enough ideas here for a knotty drama about hope, responsibility and self-drive, but mixed in with the comedy of embarrassment and the teacher’s soul searching, they exert too slight a grip on the play. It is neither funny enough for farce nor thorny enough for drama.
At the Traverse, Edinburgh, until 27 August
