Pitlochry Festival Theatre
Four stars
“But we can’t live as if we believed in nothing anymore!” John Michie’s world-weary academic, Rennie, implores, well into his cups in the second act of Peter Arnott’s new play. “We have to live at least as if we believed in something.”
Arnott’s self-styled attempt at Scottish Chekhov sees him gather his clans in a Perthshire country house on the eve of the 2014 Scottish independence referendum. And my, how civilised the world looks compared to the extremes thrown up in the decade since.
The occasion is Rennie’s retirement do, and he has a very special announcement for the focus group of Scotland’s liberal media and academic establishment in waiting who make up the guest list. These include his wife Edie, his London based art curator daughter Emma, Benny Young’s exiled actor Moon and Rennie’s former students Frank and Charlie, who have turned out very differently indeed.
Charlie is a TV populist, while Frank’s partner Kath is a youthful firebrand who has just found her first cause. Also present, if only spiritually, is Rennie and Edie’s son Will, a lost boy in a Nirvana t-shirt who rewinds everybody’s past by way of Pippa Murphy’s cut up soundscape to show off the baggage that haunts them.
David Greig’s stately production mixes up Arnott’s refreshingly well-made play with a more off-kilter style that fits the sense of its characters being stuck in a limboland between endings and beginnings. As Rennie, Michie is a battle scarred realist who has lost too much, with Deirdre Davis giving a heart rending turn as Edie. Patricia Panther’s Kath and Matthew Trevannion’s Charlie, meanwhile, are the absolutist flip sides of things to come.
Not quite a state of the nation play, Arnott’s script for this co-production between Pitlochry Festival Theatre and Edinburgh’s Royal Lyceum nevertheless taps into the complex, messed up humanity of the body politic. If the future remains unwritten, one wonders where Arnott’s characters are now.
The Herald, September 2nd 2023
Ends
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