Skip to main content

Midsummer

The Hub
Four stars

The wedding band are already playing when the audience enter the National Theatre of Scotland’s scaled-up revival of David Greig and Gordon McIntyre’s play with songs. A decade ago when it premiered, it was a zero-budget DIY rom-com with two actors playing Helena and Bob, the oddest of couples who collide into one another and accidentally go on a lost weekend to end them all. Today, Kate Hewitt’s production has Eileen Nicholas and Benny Young play the older version of Helena and Bob, unveiling their possibly unreliable memoirs and looking back at their younger selves, played with sweaty abandon by Sarah Higgins and Henry Pettigrew.  

This makes for a busy and at times frenetic ninety minutes, as the cross-generational quartet cavort among discarded wooden tables, moving from wine bar to bedroom to sex club, taking in some of Edinburgh’s lesser-spotted sights as they go. At times this has the feel of an adult It’s a Knockout party game set to music. The latter is provided by long-time stalwarts of Edinburgh’s ever-fertile off-radar music scenes, bass player Clarissa Cheong and cellist Pete Harvey, plus actor-musician Reuben Joseph.

While the combination of Greig’s script and McIntyre’s songs remain a love letter to Edinburgh, splitting the words between older and younger voices gives things an extra layer of personal ennui. Helena and Bob lived to tell the tale of their mad, debauched adventure, they can remember the first time, and are still together and possibly still crazy after all these years. This isn’t, then, a tale of lost opportunities, but of Bob and Helena’s willingness to take a chance on each other in a way that changes their lives forever. As they grab at every moment from the past, present and possible future, they make those moments matter more with every telling.

The Herald, August 7th 2018


ends

Labels

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Losing Touch With My Mind - Psychedelia in Britain 1986-1990

DISC 1 1. THE STONE ROSES   -  Don’t Stop 2. SPACEMEN 3   -  Losing Touch With My Mind (Demo) 3. THE MODERN ART   -  Mind Train 4. 14 ICED BEARS   -  Mother Sleep 5. RED CHAIR FADEAWAY  -  Myra 6. BIFF BANG POW!   -  Five Minutes In The Life Of Greenwood Goulding 7. THE STAIRS  -  I Remember A Day 8. THE PRISONERS  -  In From The Cold 9. THE TELESCOPES   -  Everso 10. THE SEERS   -  Psych Out 11. MAGIC MUSHROOM BAND  -  You Can Be My L-S-D 12. THE HONEY SMUGGLERS  - Smokey Ice-Cream 13. THE MOONFLOWERS  -  We Dig Your Earth 14. THE SUGAR BATTLE   -  Colliding Minds 15. GOL GAPPAS   -  Albert Parker 16. PAUL ROLAND  -  In The Opium Den 17. THE THANES  -  Days Go Slowly By 18. THEE HYPNOTICS   -  Justice In Freedom (12" Version) ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Myra Mcfadyen - An Obituary

Myra McFadyen – Actress   Born January 12th 1956; died October 18th 2024   Myra McFadyen, who has died aged 68, was an actress who brought a mercurial mix of lightness and depth to her work on stage and screen. Playwright and artistic director of the Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh, David Greig, called McFadyen “an utterly transformative, shamanic actor who could change a room and command an audience with a blink”. Citizens’ Theatre artistic director Dominic Hill described McFadyen’s portrayal of Puck in his 2019 production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre in London as “funny, mischievous and ultimately heartbreaking.”   For many, McFadyen will be most recognisable from Mamma Mia!, the smash hit musical based around ABBA songs. McFadyen spent two years on the West End in Phyllida Lloyd’s original 1999 stage production, and was in both film offshoots. Other big screen turns included Rob Roy (1995) and Our Ladies (2019), both directed by Mi...
1 comment
Read more

The Passage – Hip Rebel Degenerates: Black, White and Red All Over

Prelude – The Power of Three   Fear. Power. Love. This life-and-death (un)holy trinity was the driving force and raisons d’être of The Passage, the still largely unsung Manchester band sired in what we now call the post-punk era, and who between 1978 and 1983 released four albums and a handful of singles.    Led primarily by composer Dick Witts, The Passage bridged the divide between contemporary classical composition and electronic pop as much as between the personal and the political. In the oppositional hotbed of Margaret Thatcher’s first landslide, The Passage fused agit-prop and angst, and released a song called Troops Out as a single. The song offered unequivocal support for withdrawing British troops from Northern Ireland.    They wrote Anderton’s Hall, about Greater Manchester’s born again right wing police chief, James Anderton, and, on Dark Times, rubbed Brechtian polemic up against dancefloor hedonism. On XOYO, their most commercial and potentially mo...
Post a Comment
Read more