Playwright Laurie Motherwell is sensitive about stereotypes. In a comedy about two working-class Glasgow lads with entrepreneurial ambitions, he repeatedly resists the temptation to lead them towards a life of crime. Any time Sean (Sean Connor) and Daro (Cameron Fulton) get the chance to cut a corner in their get-rich-quick scheme to run an ice-cream van, he stops them in their tracks. They pay a fine for forgetting to buy a licence and refuse to deal in contraband. They won’t even pass off regular milk for organic.
And although he sneaks in the phrase “comfort and joy”, in a sly reference to the Bill Forsyth movie inspired by Glasgow’s drug-related ice-cream wars, Sean and Daro Flake It ’Til They Make It is resolutely not another west-coast underworld play about turf wars, hardmen and addicts.
Instead, it is a sharp-talking comedy about youthful ambition meeting cold reality, as the old friends try to make a go of a business that has little traction outside the warm days of summer. Where Sean is morose and introspective, a university dropout reeling from the death of his mother, Daro is bumptious and positive, a wide boy who will go as far as his mouth will carry him. Despite their differing levels of education, the system promises little to either of them.
Avoiding cliche is commendable, but it does leave the play with little sense of jeopardy. A loan shark is dodgy but benign, profits are low but not debilitating and their money-making schemes are more eccentric than ruinous. It means you wish them well without caring too much whether they are successful or not.
In Robert Softley Gale’s happy production on Karen Tennent’s set, with its convincing two-dimensional facsimile of an ice-cream van, this leaves the heavy lifting to Motherwell’s snappy banter and the energetic performances of Fulton and Connor.
The two make a close-knit team, capturing that aspect of male camaraderie that is all attack and no giving of ground. Funny in their contrasting temperaments, they have an instinctive feel for Motherwell’s comic rhythms and, beneath the barbs and recriminations, capture the resilience of a long established odd-couple friendship.
At the Traverse, Edinburgh, until 27 August
