The Signalman

No relation to the Charles Dickens ghost story of the same name, The Signalman by Scottish playwright Peter Arnott is a companion piece to his play Tay Bridge, which opened Dundee Rep Theatre’s 20th anniversary season in 2019 and commemorated the 140th anniversary of the Tay Bridge disaster.

Originally staged as part of the A Play, a Pie and a Pint lunchtime theatre season in Glasgow, the play won the Critics’ Award for Theatre in Scotland, but it was still little-seen before the pandemic.

It’s a treat to see it staged as the reopening production of Perth Theatre. Directed with subtle precision by Ken Alexander, the monologue unfolds like clockwork, with Tom McGovern beautifully evoking the powerful emotive construction of Arnott’s words.

McGovern plays Thomas Barclay, signalman on the last set of points before the train line leaves Fife for the Tay Bridge to Dundee. Forty years on, still hard at work, he reminisces on the night he sent across the train that infamously plunged into the Tay when the bridge collapsed, and the inquiry that followed.

Of the night itself, Arnott’s verbal crescendo and Wayne Dowdeswell’s lighting evoke the raw terror of the young man’s crawl along the bridge in a whipping wind to investigate a tragedy he thinks he might only have imagined.

Arnott’s gift for subtle parallels comes into play here, around fake news, the othering of the victims and the sense of random, tragic pointlessness that many of us have recently felt. It’s a deft, effective piece that grips both the heart and the mind.