Long Live the Little Knife

It's rare in theatre for uplifting, redemptive conclusions to arise from scenes depicting genital mutilation. If nothing else, David Leddy's Long Live the Little Knife satisfies on this front, but is otherwise a brash and manic triumph.

The entirety of the theatre is covered in paint-splattered dustsheets and the stage strewn with cans of Special Brew when we're introduced to Liz and Jim, husband and wife con artists. They've achieved a level of comfort in life as "fake vintage tat merchants", but their happiness comes to a head when professional rivals force them to seek a quarter of a million pounds in protection money. Unscrupulous crime lord The Wee Man encourages the pair to raise funds through art forgery, and so they doggedly pursue this agenda despite lacking all the requisite skills.

Wendy Seager and Neil McCormack are fine comic performers and carry the farce with frenetic aplomb. We laugh at their characters' skewed airs and graces as their desperate naiveté digs them into an increasingly depraved hole. The humour eventually gives way to a sense of tragedy and pathos, however, the actors' range finally causing us to feel sympathy toward the unlikely heroes.

The infinitely amusing script is based on a series of interviews conducted with a real life Liz and Jim, and calls the psychology and authenticity of truth into question. Fact and fiction, we discover, are ultimately interchangeable and all we can say for certain is that Leddy remains one of Scotland's most exciting voices.