Traverse
Theatre, Edinburgh
Four
stars
The
earth moves ever so slightly in Clare Duffy’s new play, commissioned for this
Traverse Theatre production by Edinburgh’s new writing theatre with the
University of Edinburgh’s Institute of Advanced Studies in the Humanities while
Duffy was a fellow there. The action takes place in the bathroom, where mother
and daughter Margret and Ella are preparing for Ella’s temporary departure from
the isolated Scottish island where they both live, with Margret left holding the
baby.
Ella
is not going to her best friend’s wedding as she says. She is going to save the
world, an environmental activist standing firm on the frontline, protecting the
earth’s natural resources from being plundered by oil-hungry forces for whom
money is all that matters. But what about everything she leaves behind, Margret and her baby included? What or who matters most?
As Margret locks them both in the bathroom, this age-old conundrum between personal
and political loyalties are fought over for sixty-five minutes of
cross-generational sparring as worried mothers and rebellious daughters have
done since time immemorial. Taking place in more or less real time, Nicholls’
production brings out a pair of nuanced performances by Jennifer Black as Margret and Nesha Caplan as Ella, who are onstage for the play’s full duration.
If
things threaten to go a little bit grand guignol mid-way through, it is only to
knock some kind of sense into the pair of them, who are both as good and as bad
as each other in their relationship with the responsibilities of being a
grown-up. If the bigger, braver life-saving causes they both aspire too are
frustratingly just out of reach, the more mundane but just as life-changing
first-world problems they must square up to provide some kind of salvation.
The Herald, October 12th 2018
ends
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