With a male actor in drag and a young musician playing electric guitar with a violin bow, Venus as a Boy sounds like the kind of Edinburgh Fringe show which should be avoided. However, when the actor is one of Scotland's finest Tam Dean Burn , the musician is the author Luke Sutherland and the show is produced by the National Theatre of Scotland Workshop, audiences have every right to expect a theatre work of real substance.
Based on Sutherland's semi-biographical novel, the piece is a variably effective retelling of the tragic life of "Cupid", a transsexual male prostitute from Orkney who meets an untimely death in London. Described as a memorial rather than a play, the show which enjoys a strong, form-changing performance from Burn is sometimes emotionally affecting, but never really pulls off the difficult trick of encapsulating episodic prose fiction in theatrical terms.
Burn's acting and Sutherland's live music fail to connect, adding to an overall sense of roughness which finds its lowest point in a truly uninspired sung version of William Blake's great poem "The Garden of Love". Burn co-directs the piece himself, and one can't help but feel that his fellow director, Christine Devaney, could have brought more discipline to the proceedings.
The word is that a film version is in prospect; this mixed bag of a theatre show looks decidedly like a rough draft for a Neil Jordan movie. Subtitled "The Ballad of Leila and Lee", the play rolls two Fife adolescents a young Muslim girl who secretly self-harms and a "bad boy" from a broken home into a Bonnie-and-Clyde-in-the-Highlands scenario. Played on a bare stage, with unforgiving lighting, four chairs and little bar a skipped cap by way of costumes, it cuts self-consciously between simple storytelling and theatrical poetics.
Ultimately, however, the show is raised above the average Fringe production by the intensity of Greig's writing and a superb four-strong cast: the performance by the exceptional young actress Nalini Chetty as Leila is good enough to grace any theatre. Terms and Conditions. Style Book. Weather Forecast.
