Traverse Theatre
Four Stars
Old friendships are forever changing in Douglas Maxwell’s new play. This is brought home when Davie and Liane visit life long pal Milo for a carry out and wine. An unexpected guest comes in the form of Greta, who’s half the age of everyone else in the room, and who, in Liane’s eyes, at least, might just be filling an all too recent void that goes way beyond mid life crisis to something far deeper.
Such are the assorted gauntlets thrown down by Maxwell in a play that taps into the all too fragile tensions of so called domestic bliss, the ever widening gulf between the generations, and the inter personal wounds opened up by different responses to grief.
Over its non stop eighty minutes, Gareth Nicholls’ perfectly poised production – a collaboration between the Traverse, the Citizens theatre and Raw Material - gives vent to Maxwell’s firecracker dialogue with a maturity and discipline that sits well with the play’s themes. Maxwell knows a punchline when he writes one, but there is some pretty grown-up stuff going on here that is as telling about mid life trauma as it is about the acquired baggage that comes with it.
This is played out beautifully on Kenny Miller’s living room set, with a perfectly nuanced set of performances that reveal four people full of yearning, even as three of them mourn their best friend. Andy Clark brings a deceptive ordinariness to Davie that is a neat counterpoint to Milo’s self conscious hipness brought to life by Nicholas Karimi. As Greta, Yana Harris captures the assuredness of youth, while Lucianne McEvoy invests Liane with a magnificently articulated sense of righteous fury.
It is Liane who attempts to find some kind of reconciliation, in a gorgeous closing speech that toasts the play’s absent fifth character, accepting how things move on and setting a whole new set of memories in motion in a beautifully realised play that rages against the dying of the light.
The Herald, August 8th 2024
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