Further away, his God, from him...

BE NEAR ME, Lowry Quays

ACTOR Ian McDiarmid fell for Scottish author Andrew O’Hagen’s prize-nominated novel Be Near Me and determined to turn it into a play.

Which wasn’t at all easy: O’Hagen’s story of Father David — a diffident priest whose fifties are damaged by life and a lost lover in his twenties — slips back and forth in time to reveal how the past informs the present.

Since McDiarmid, who also stars in this Donmar Warehouse/National Theatre of Scotland production, is clearly never going to see his twenties again, then in the present his adaptation remains.

Which is slightly damaging to the staged version. The story has Father David; posh, Oxford-educated and from a comfortable English background, in charge of a decimated, jobless parish on the Ayrshire coast, riven with long-standing Orange/Catholic hatreds now being turned against immigrants and others. He doesn’t fit in.

The lonely priest, basically good at heart but yearning — like everyone around him — for something to fill a void, is energised by two teenagers.

Befriending them, he allows his loneliness to overstep his boundaries one night and a single fumbling kiss with the 15-year-old, swaggering, drug-taking, drunken “child” (Richard Madden) turns out to be his undoing — and later, his freedom from a life of acting a part.

The book is a serious one with many themes and ideas, which means McDiarmid’s fast-moving adaptation instils only a taste of its depth and characters — the self-improving housekeeper Mrs Poole (the wonderful Blythe Duff), for example, his only real friend and also chief critic; and even his own mother (the very impressive Colette O’Neil), a late-blooming, successful novelist.

With a strong eye for the theatrical, McDiarmid creates animated key scenes — a local wedding reception where he is surrounded by the drunken relatives, a dinner party with the bishop and local worthies — that enliven an already far-from-dull evening.

Only occasionally does he go too far: a misjudged courtroom scene, which has scant regard for reality, does little to prevent the story exhibiting natural flabbiness in the second half.

But with McDiarmid’s own performance as the unlikeable but fascinating priest; the brilliant ensemble cast; John Tiffany’s top-notch production, the strong, simple design and the evocative string of sectarian songs that punctuate scenes, even a taste of the book turns out more fascinating and watchable than we could hope to expect.