Theatre reviews: ChildMinder | Bloodbank

Bloodbank, Oran Mor, Glasgow ****

What makes for a good ghost story? The sense of a wrong that has never been righted, perhaps, festering and burning down the decades and centuries. Playwright and psychiatrist Iain McClure’s new play ChildMinder is a story of an Edinburgh psychiatrist called Joseph who is haunted by two deaths; the death of his baby brother, whom he suffocated in a jealous rage when he was only five, and the death by suicide of one of his teenage patients, three decades later.

In five scenes – slow to unfold, but darkly compelling, in Kolbrun Bjort Sigfusdottir’s uncompromising production – McClure’s story leads us from a moment when the police finally confront a 50-year-old Joseph with the truth about his brother’s death, through an escape to academic life in New York and a desperate bid for happiness with a much younger woman, back to the moment of the teenage patient’s death 25 years ago, and forward again to a desperate crisis involving a haunting by that same patient, and a tragic coda in contemporary New York.

Throughout the play, there’s a suggestion of a huge guilt that hangs around Joseph’s character, as if his brother’s death, and his failure to accept responsibility for it, symbolise some much deeper failure of high-status Western men like Joseph. His American lover Cindy is of Native American origin, full of anger at the fate of her people, and determination to honour her heritage; she also has a #MeToo generation scepticism about some of his sexual attitudes. And Sam, the patient who dies, is a desperately disadvantaged teenager whose fate speaks volumes about the social divisions in Joseph’s native city.

Yet somehow – at least in this staging, and despite a striking studio design which uses powerful lighting and video to follow Joseph from dream and reality to nightmare – the play struggles to flesh out the link between these wider themes and Joseph’s personal tragedy, perhaps because it is so difficult to attach full moral responsibility to a horrifying act committed by a child. In a memorably haunted performance – strongly supported by Ben Ewing as Sam and Mara Huf as Cindy – Cal McAninch plays Joseph as a man in permanent flight from a deeply personal truth, until he can flee no more. Yet his final admission of guilt brings no sense of wider awareness or resolution; only a despair that is hard to witness, but perhaps fair enough, given the unhealed depth of many of the scars of injustice that disfigure our world.

There is at least as much darkness, and more overt politics, in Meghan Tyler’s new Play, Pie, And Pint drama Bloodbank; but here, the genre is blood-splattered farce, and the spirit both satirical and raunchy. In Becky Hope Palmer’s bold production – with a stylishly bloody set by Gemma Patchett and Jonny Scott – Rehanna Macdonald plays Priya, a Tory Chancellor of the Exchequer with a regular appointment for treatment by a curvaceous middle-aged nurse called Caris, played with tremendous flair by Lynsey-Anne Moffat.

These encounters, though, involve not only some weirdly non-medical beauty treatments, but also a strong dose of sapphic sex; and when the wonderful Anna Russell-Martin, as starving benefits claimant Bonnie, walks in on one of their encounters, bringing with her a fierce tradition of anti-Tory politics, the idea of Priya as a literal blood-sucker takes on a dramatic life of its own.

Meanwhile, Caris and Bonnie begin to discover some poignant common ground, as two ordinary women struggling for dignity and survival in Priya’s broken Britain. Tyler’s play, though, boldly suggests that this world is now too hostile an environment for their loving humanity; which will have to seek a future elsewhere, and learn how to defend itself, at last.

ChildMinder is at the Byre Theatre, St Andrews, 28-29 June; Bloodbank is at Oran Mor, Glasgow, until tomorrow