Pitlochry Festival Theatre Four stars "If you don't want to see a man fall," the Proprietor of the out of season Alpine hotel says at one point in David Greig's stately meditation on identity, "look away." Like the play it belongs to, it's a line that works on many levels. The fall the Proprietor refers to stems from the army of intrepid would-be explorers braving the rocks, but it also refers to the plight of the unnamed middle-aged Man found unconscious in the snow but unable to remember anything of himself or how he got there. A young woman, Anna, is dispatched from the British Consulate to find out who the man is, only to fall for his world-weary charm. When another woman, Vivienne, arrives at the hotel, a whole new world opens up about who exactly the Man might be. There is laughter and forgetting aplenty in John Durnin's urbane revival of Greig's 2005 play, which, in the courtyard of Frances Collier's design, is rendered as a piece of
An archive of arts writing by Neil Cooper. Effete No Obstacle.