FOR many, fishing is something to do when you've time on your hands. Harsh economic climates, however, often give those who earn their living braving rough seas all the spare time they need. In Catherine Lucy Czerkawska's monologue for Oran Mor's A Play, A Pie And A Pint season of lunchtime plays, Rab is the living embodiment of all that human waste.
A washed-up loner who was never a natural fisherman, he spins a line from a past of certainties that he clings to with increasing desperation. There's the long-dead grandad he hails as "the greatest fisherman in the world", or, more heartbreakingly, his brother, Jimmy, whom he looked up to with even more admiration. In a community so dependent on one thing for its livelihood, tragedy is never far away, and, as Rab's life slowly unravels, domestic fall-out becomes a metaphor for a far greater force that ravages an entire way of life.
From the moment Paul Morrow's stumblebum, Rab, steps onto Adrienne Atkinson's junk-strewn beach set, his sense of pain and displacement glares out. To sustain such haunted vulnerability without falling prey to hysterics is a feat in itself. Morrow fairly puts himself through the emotional wringer in Gerda Stevenson's taut little production, which manages to breathe dramatic life into what initially feels like a radio play.
Czerkawska's framing device of the fish supper as an all too familiar life force may fall prey to sentimentality towards the end, but the play remains a powerful insight into post-industrial turmoil.
The best in this season to date.
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