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Adulting

Tron Theatre, Glasgow
Three stars

Confused twenty-somethings take note. Just because you've reached an age which received wisdom and assorted rites of passage declare that you're a fully-fledged grown-up who can safely be let loose in the big wide world, that doesn't mean the growing pains will stop. Far from it, in fact, as the quartet who make up the young Spilt Milk company make entertainingly clear in this devised compendium of self help style party games and acquired wisdom.

It begins with our hapless quartet sharing real life notes culled from surveys with strangers on how the short leap from adolescence to adulthood isn't quite as straightforward as advertised. On a set lined with shiny post-it notes and leftover childhood totems, school disco cheesy pop classics usher in a series of playful meditations on falling in and out of love and what your younger and older self might learn from such inbetweeners on the verge of something they can't quite put their finger on.

As devised and performed by Anthony Byrne, Grant McDonald, Jacqueline Thain and Catherine Ward-Stoddart, this fifty minute confessional of innocence and experience resembles a collective show and tell performed in a play-pen. While this suggests a generation caught in a state of terminal adolescence, it also seems to plunder a similar set of dramatic reference points that some of their elders on the experimental theatre scene have never quite grown out of.

At the show's loose-knit and ever-developing heart is some sound advice that says that however serious things turn out, keeping tight hold of the child within is an essential accessory to survive. It's a notion that will be around for eternity.

The Herald, June 20th 2016

ends

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