I GUESS it's statistically time for Communicado to suffer a flop, but it's a shame it should be with the last all-new production director Gerry Mulgrew is expected to stage with the company he founded. It's hard to pinpoint what's gone wrong with this short play by Czech writer Pavel Kohout. The omens were good. It's translated by Bill Findlay into a modern colloquial Scots. It is driven by the same kind of iron-curtain paranoia that made The Suicide such a success. And Mulgrew's production is energetic and committed. But once the humour of the initial situation wears off (a newly married couple have their coitus interrupted by a gang of crooked firemen), the black comedy starts to appear obvious, and the drama has nowhere to go. All I can suggest - and it is only a suggestion - is that Mulgrew has played the lightness in preference to the shade, while Kahout's allegory for a corrupt state
is too dark a drama to be played as farce.
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