Traverse
Theatre, Edinburgh
Four
stars
Maddy
and Rory are the most perfect first-world couple imaginable at the start of
Frances Poet’s new play, given a broodingly forensic rendering by director
Zinnie Harris in this production for the Traverse in association with the
National Theatre of Scotland. There they are, finishing each other’s sentences
off over a civilised glass of wine while their three-year-old son Josh sleeps
in his bedroom next door.
As
they share barely-there nudge-nudge innuendos with Rory’s mother Morven after putting
Josh in her care, Morven lets slip an incident involving outside forces who may
or may not have brought harm to her grand-son. The chain of events this sets
off almost brings Maddy and Rory’s world collapsing in on them, and only a leap
of faith and a possible blind eye to go with it can save things.
Poet’s
play is troublingly in tune with a current wave of TV drama that picks at the psychological
sores of a post-Yewtree climate, when the old certainties of cartoon saviours have
given way to sometimes justifiable over-protective paranoia. The bogeyman here
is the ubiquitous Stranger, actually a series of individuals played with creepy
intent in a uniform pink shirt by George Anton, whose every remark seems loaded
to add fuel to Maddy’s increasingly unhinged fire.
With the
ice-cool order of designer Fred Meller’s living room noisily upended into
chaos, Harris’ production ramps up the Stranger’s oddness by the initial normality
of a world symbolised by both Lorraine McIntosh’s more traditionally mumsy
Morven and Peter Collins’ Rory. A tug-of-war between Morven and a simmeringly
brilliant Kirsty Stuart’s increasingly over-arched Maddy over an original Kermit
the Frog doll turns out to be the least of it in a play that takes just enough
leaps out of the ordinary to illustrate the extremes a mother’s love sometimes must
endure.
The Herald, April 27th 2018
ends
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