CHILDMINDER is the latest play from the pen of psychiatrist, painter and playwright Iain McClure.
Staged on this short tour by producer Michelle McKay (with support from Creative Scotland and the Traverse Theatre) and directed by Kolbrún Björt Sigfúsdóttir, it is a daring and intriguing 95 minutes of theatre.
Starring the superb Scottish actor Cal MacAninch in the role of internationally renowned child psychiatrist Professor Joseph Croan, this complex, sometimes compelling piece addresses subjects as difficult and diverse as child abuse (both physical and sexual), childhood trauma, suppressed memory and the centuries-old legacy of the genocide of the First Nations people by white European colonialists.
Set in Edinburgh and Manhattan at numerous points in the past and the near future, the drama intertwines the stories of Sam (Ben Ewing), a dreadfully socially marginalised teenager in Croan’s care, with the romantic relationship between Croan and Cindy (Mara Huf), a high-achieving, Native American academic who is 20 years his junior.
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To synopsise the play much more than this would be to step into a veritable minefield of spoilers.
The subjects of McClure’s play are abundant and intricately interconnected. They are also charged with heavy psychological, emotional and political significance.
The piece collides two connected traumas (one from Croan’s childhood, the other from his professional life) with his developing relationship with Cindy. The latter is laid out in a lengthy, see-sawing scene in a credibly bizarre, themed restaurant in New York City, which shares Cindy’s archaeological interest.
Celebrating Cindy’s newly-awarded PhD, the couple opt for the menu of accurately sourced, local, 18th-century ingredients (including buffalo meat).
The joy of Cindy’s success, and of a romantic relationship in its exciting, early days, is tempered by the young woman’s concerns about a recent, distressing episode from Croan’s professional work in Edinburgh.
The scene (which is laced with comedy, due, in no short measure, to Ewing’s performance as an enigmatic waiter) exemplifies the play’s many strengths, but also its shortcomings.
As it shifts back and forth, it is, by turns, powerfully cogent and distractingly implausible (not least when, sitting in a Manhattan dining room, Croan engages in a psycho-sexual fantasy that is, improbably, unintentionally confessional).
The implausibility of the play deepens in its penultimate scene, which hinges on the malfunctioning of a, frankly, silly technology of the near future. As to the final scene, both the heavy-handed politico-cultural symbolism and the predictability of the crucial action are unworthy of the insight and intelligence that are to be found earlier in the piece.
Played on designer Kenneth MacLeod’s simple, smartly adaptable, neon-trimmed set (which is augmented affectingly by video designer Rob Willoughby), ChildMinder is an admirably brave and ambitious work of playwriting. It boasts universally excellent acting, particularly from MacAninch as the ego-massaged, yet psychologically tortured, Croan.
Frustratingly, however, the drama is undone, to a considerable degree, by its being overloaded with subjects and, in its concluding scenes, hamstrung by crass dramatic choices.
At Beacon Arts Centre, Greenock, June 14 & 15 June, and Byre Theatre, St Andrews 28 & 29 June
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