Tunes of Glory

James Kennaway is the one that got away; dead in 1968 in a car crash at the age of 40 just as his career as a novelist and screenwriter was about to go supernova. He already had a half a dozen novels published, and was writing screenplays in Hollywood for films featuring actors such as Alec Guinness and Peter O'Toole.

You might have thought that Scottish theatres would be falling over themselves to book a handsome stage adaptation of his best known novel and film, "Tunes of Glory". But Michael Lunney's Middle Ground theatre company could hardly give the show away north of the border. Only Perth gets to see it - which at least brings Kennaway back to within a few miles of his birthplace in Auchterarder.

To which one can only add, lucky Perth. For in many respects this is a handsome old-fashioned show, almost the stylistic antithesis of that other piece of Scottish militaria on stage at the moment, the very modern "Black Watch". What they have in common is scale; Lunney's show has an even bigger cast, 17 in all, all in full military regalia, big real-life sets, elaborate back projections of Edinburgh castle, carefully integrated music from the pipes and drums of the London Scottish Regiment, also projected on film, and some well known faces in the leading roles.

Stewart McGugan is the brash and noisy Major Jock Sinclair and Richard Walsh is his nemesis, the tight-lipped disciplinarian Colonel Basil Barrow who comes to take over the regiment Jock has made his own. The tension between these two apparent opposites, the one from the wrong side of the tracks in Glasgow, the other the product of public school and Oxford, is the well-spring of the plot. And yet, and this was surely part of what Kennaway was getting at in the original novel, not far beneath the surface, these two men are very much the same, both destroyed from within by their experiences in the recent war, both barely keeping it together in a post-war world where everyone else is trying to move on.

Walsh's is by far the better performance which throws the evening a little out of kilter. And the decision he is faced with, after McGugan's character has struck a young corporal, seems less difficult now than it probably did at the time. But you can have a lot worse evenings in the theatre than this.