Gregory Burke's Black Watch was the highlight of the Edinburgh Festival three years ago, going on to tour all over the world. But it's the Scottish playwright's debut 'Gagarin Way' that now makes its welcome return to the Fringe. Set in a Fife factory, the play involves the botched kidnapping of visiting company executive Frank Van-der-Hoy (Bruce Morton). Disenfranchised and desperate, factory employees Eddie (Phil Nichol) and Gary (Jim Muir) hope their actions will send out a message to the world that they're no longer willing to be exploited. Unwillingly involved in the crime is security guard Tom (Will Andrews), who naively tries to convince his fellow workers there's "another way to do things".The Scots are known to speak quickly (ask any tourist), and for the first half of the play the actors are guilty of performing the dialog a little too naturalistic, leading to some of the more gems of Eddie's opening rants about Sartre and suicide being lost on the audience. It's only when the pace slows down that the atmosphere really starts to build up, with the tension levels not dropping until the explosive climax.Muir plays Gary like a wound up coil ready to burst at any point, and is genuinely threatening when pacing around the pallet laden factory floor. Nervy security guard/student Tom is brilliantly portrayed by Andrews, managing to gain the audience sympathy from the offset by creating an extremely likable, if naive young character.Spending half the play unconscious, Morton has a difficult job, given that he's tied up and not able to move for the entire performance. This is perhaps why he's not able to reach the intensity levels generated by the rest of the cast. He doesn't quite convince us that he's more than a match for his captors, though not helped by having to deliver his main speech with back to the audience.Nichols though is perhaps the most disappointing. Not so much with his acting ability, but with the handling of the deliciously dark comedy. Given that Eddie gets all the best lines, I expected Nichols' skill as a comedian to make the most of them. Unfortunately his speed of delivery loses a bit too much of the script.With source material as good as this, I was hoping this band of professional comedians would be great things with humour in what is a very funny play. However they appear to have put their comic talents to one side and concentrate purely on character performance, which though successful, feels like an opportunity wasted to get the best out of this amazing script.
