Versatile duo Pat Abernethy and Dave Marsden are among the hardest-working travelling players currently treading the boards.
The founders of the Isosceles Theatre Company have been performing a diverse range of original comedies, musicals and dramas all over the UK since the 1980s, having previously established a fanbase among audiences in Ireland.
Straight acting and Useful Idiots
Kevin Laffan, the creator of long-running TV soap Emmerdale, wrote two new plays for Abernethy and Marsden in the late ’90s, setting them on a path more focused on straight acting roles than the largely sketch-based performances they’d specialised in up to that point.
A successful link-up with the self-deprecating Useful Idiots – writer Patrick Prior and actor-cum-director Jim Dunk – in the wake of the hits Odd Ball Out and The Husband’s Tale has given rise to a turbo-charging of the Isosceles mainstays’ dramatic output since the turn of the century.
Body of work
Guided by Prior’s prolific pen, Belfast-born Abernethy and Marsden, from Dublin, have taken on thought-provoking work that’s taken in such diverse subject matter as the tribulations of a rock tribute outfit in The Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band Changed My Life Forever, Celtic supporters looking back on how their team overcame the might of Inter Milan to become European champions (On Our Way To Lisbon), and a study of the shipping boss who literally walked away from the most notorious peacetime sinking of all-time (The Man Who Left The Titanic).
Along the way they’ve also impressed with piano-led song and story evenings, as well as such self-penned offerings as a version of Mora Grey’s novel Beckett’s Last Act and Behind You, a poignant production looking at the bleak showbiz underbelly.
Arriving in Dunfermline next Friday, Prior’s take on Robert Louis Stevenson’s iconic 1886 novella of double lives and inner demons, Strange Case Of Dr Jekyll And Mr Hyde, was first staged by Isosceles in 2006.
It continues to perfectly fit a powerful strain of the playwright’s output that has also seen him focus on infamous goings-on in the Victorian era via such subjects as serial killer Jack The Ripper, Edinburgh’s infamous Burke and Hare murders, a terrifying haunted house in fog-filled London and repeated foiled attempts to assassinate the monarch.
Classic gothic horror
Still among the most famous works in the history of English literature and one of the defining books of the gothic horror genre, Stevenson’s mad scientist thriller has been given dozens of theatrical reworkings since it was first adapted for the stage in Boston in 1887.
As well as being staged in many of the UK’s most venerated provincial theatres, the Dunk-directed period version has – perhaps uniquely – also been performed in schools for children with language and communication difficulties.
It’s also comparatively rare for just two actors to take on all the roles in the London-set yarn, but that’s exactly what Abernethy and Marsden do in their compact but nuanced telling – as per nearly all of their plays.
The Isosceles team’s forensic examination of man’s addiction to miscreant ways is played out on a minimalist set made up of simple tables and chairs.
Refreshingly gimmick-free, atmosphere, intimacy and imagination are this troupe’s watchwords.
Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde is at Carnegie Hall on September 2. Tickets from onfife.com
