PalaceTheatre, Kilmarnock
Four stars
There's a deep-set poignancy in David Harrower's own production of his
play about a brother and sister's reconciliation that feels more fully
realised than when it was first produced in 2011. This may or may not
have something to do with the fact that Harrower's revival for
Borderline Theatre Company is touring the country in a way it hasn't
done before, but either way it captures a splintered sense of intimacy
that seems to sum up the state of a nation in flux, whereby the
personal and the political and the local and the global are bound
together.
Athol and Morna may have both been brought up in Edinburgh, but even
beyond their fourteen year estrangement, they are worlds apart. Where
Morna gets by cleaning rich people's houses inbetween bringing up her
son, Joshua, Athol runs his own construction business from his
Renfrewshire living room opposite the house where the Glasgow Airport
terrorists holed up prior to their botched 2007 attack. When Joshua
turns up on Athol's doorstep just before his twenty-first birthday,
the umbilical ties that bind them all gradually unravel a past of
domestic conflict that has left indelible scars.
The sense of place in Harrower's writing is exquisite in these two
inter-connected monologues, especially as delivered by Lewis Howden and
Pauline Knowles, who play the siblings flanked by hazy impressions of
windows that suggest a network of modern day fortresses. For all the
emotional rawness and brutal honesty on display, there's something
bigger going on in this quietest of epics that's about an entire
community reconciling itself with its differences as it tries to find
somewhere called home.
The Herald, March 25th 2014
ends
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