The Tobacco Merchant's Lawyer

Synopsis

1780. Glasgow is booming, but the American war is looming, and the city’s wealth is dependent on the import and export of American tobacco. Can the great port survive? However, this pressing question is NOT addressed by Enoch Dalmellington, Virginia Street. He is more concerned about marrying off his dreich pious humourless daughter Euphemia, being able to afford his pew at the Tron Kirk, and what to do about Mistress Zapata’s scurrilous predictions about Glasgow in 2009. Apparently "women will be attending university, the poor will all have water closets and his beloved Virginia Street will become a hotbed of sodomy!"

Our Review:

5 October 2009

The London premiere of Iain Heggie’s Edinburgh success, The Tobacco Merchant’s Lawyer, gets the autumn season at the Finborough off to a cracking start. The play is a one-act monologue set in Glasgow in 1785 and follows the fortunes of small-time lawyer Enoch Dalmellington, played by Callum Cuthbertson.

Enoch, and the play, are haunted by a soothsayer called Madam Zapata who has visions of life in 2009; this device positions a contemporary voice in the past to dissect the paradoxes of the present.

Heggie’s dialogue, combined with Liz Carruthers’s direction, allow the centripetal movement of Enoch, a character with a naturally conservative and strongly moral disposition, to pull against the centrifugal force of the period’s desire for economic expansion. Whilst most of the figures described by Enoch travel the world, Enoch himself is increasingly circumscribed, forced into the attic of his beloved house in orde...

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