Edinburgh's Grid Iron company has staged an adaptation of Andrew O'Hagan's semi-autobiographical novel Mayflies in a warehouse in Leith, evoking the flavour of 1986 Manchester's Haçienda. The site-specific production, directed by Ben Harrison, focuses on the book's central motif: a teenage trip to Manchester for the Festival of the Tenth Summer and a night at the Haçienda.
Warehouse setting evokes Thatcher-era transition
The choice of location is a decent fit, if you can forgive the echoey acoustics, not least in the way the hedonistic past never stops informing the sobering present. At either end of the large space, the audience sitting on four sides, Lewis den Hertog projects a non-stop catalogue of images – fleeting footage of Morrissey and Marr, the vivid Peter Saville colours championed by Factory Records – that feel like an exhibition in themselves. The soundtrack by David Paul Jones bubbles with snatches of Joy Division, the Smiths and the Fall.
Narrative energy in first third
It is an odd novel to put on the stage. All the narrative energy comes in the first third when Jimmy, Tully and their exuberant pals fulfil their romantic dream of travelling south to Manchester. The bulk of it is a reflection on that formative trip from the perspective of adulthood. When, in the play, the grownup Tully (an excellent Graham Mackay-Bruce) declares his illness, he clings on to his maverick spirit and insists there will be “no mawkishness”.
But how could there be anything but that as he and his friends – Matthew Pidgeon as Jimmy, Carmen Pieraccini as Jimmy's wife Iona and Lucianne McEvoy as Tully's wife Anna – endure the slow process of his departure? Fidelity to the book is the adaptation's strength and weakness. At Rear Warehouse, Brown's of Leith, Edinburgh, until 30 August.
