There are certain times of our lives whose intensity feels formative. Or perhaps it’s because so much of our selves are being forged in those moments that their experience is searing. The turning point at the end of school before moving on to – who knowns what, exactly? – but ‘adulthood’, is one of those times. Everything is changing, everything is charged – it makes for highly sympathetic art and Alan Warner’s Scottish novel The Sopranos creates six hugely memorable characters whose vibrant, chaotic grab for life on the cusp of leaving school is immensely identifiable at the same time as being utterly extreme.
Lee Hall’s adaptation in this NTS / Live Theatre co-production still bears some of the hallmarks of its source material. There’s a novelistic turn to the dramaturgy whose structure is diffuse and episodic, following each of our protagonists to the very end of each of their narratives. To tell this tale of Scottish-choirgirls-gone-bad through song however, with a score that stretches from the liturgical to the progressive, is a brilliant decision. All the heart and energy that makes the characters leap from the page translates into a pure and show-stopping quality of performance. The deliciously scabrous back wall of Chloe Lamford’s set vividly articulates the poverty and oppressive religiosity the girls are – one way or another – escaping. Elsewhere, Vicki Featherstone’s lean direction places a picaresque cast of characters, almost entirely men, in the gift of her cast of six girls to recreate. Lovely clear and comic physical performance brings to life a world of the lecherous, drunk, and plain stupid, and this styling – of the world entirely created by the girls – also creates the sense that these women, for all the challenges they face, might yet be mistresses of their destinies.
It’s all here – love, death, sex, theft, arson, and a helluva lot of booze. The production smacks of the high production and performance quality you would expect from the National Theatre of Scotland, and, if the storytelling is sometime is a bit baggy, the energy and charm of characters and performers in their memorable multiroling style more than makes up for it.