Theatre

Though often as muddled as a wino on his breakfast bottle, Grid Iron have nonetheless crafted a rambunctiously entertaining hour in this dramatisation cobbled together from stories and poems by famed bon viveur-cum-writer Charles Bukowski.

Chief asset is Keith Fleming as Bukowski’s alter-ego Henry; though he makes little effort to look or sound like the author, he inhabits his words passionately. A lusty bear-like drunk, he moves between cartoon misogyny and radiant humanity at the pop of a cork and makes dousing oneself in Vino Collapso look impossibly romantic. Gail Watson covers a lot of ground as the various women in his life, particularly beautiful-souled loon Cass.

The use of the Barony Bar space is a nice flourish and the pair inhabit it well, gliding over the counter and making clumsy love on table-tops; it’s window-dressing, but it’s welcome. Nonetheless, ‘Barflies’ doesn’t really add up to all you’d hope. The script often jars thanks to the insistence that this is all happening in the modern day, with crassly crowbarred-in references to Microsoft breaking the hard-bitten '50s romance.

The main problem, though, is that for all the rich, robust language there isn’t really a compelling through story, at least not beyond Henry’s tragi-comic relationship with Cass, which concludes before the halfway mark. When he launches into a tale about a new woman some four-fifths of the way in, it’s hard to really care; same goes for the rather perfunctory happy ending, with final sweetheart Sarah laughably thin next to the elemental Cass. Bukowski may have been one of the finest authors of the twentieth century, but he wasn’t a playwright; ‘Barflies’ does little to suggest that this was the stage's loss.  

'Barflies' played at the Traverse @ The Barony, 81-85 Broughton Street, Edinburgh.