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Ivor

Òran Mor, Glasgow

Three stars

 

Birthday girl Scarlet is in for a big surprise when she goes home to mum Sarah for her twenty-first. The very special present waiting for her in Jennifer Adam’s new play for Òran Mor’s current A Play, a Pie and a Pint lunchtime theatre season turns out to be something pretty titanic. To say it wasn’t what Scarlet was expecting is something of an understatement, especially as an environmental activist with big plans of her own with her girlfriend and fellow agitator Judyth. To carry out those plans, however, Scarlet needs to get her hands on her inheritance left to her by her dad, who passed away fifteen years earlier. A somewhat large obstacle, alas, is preventing Scarlet from getting her hands on it. In an increasingly hothouse environment, things go into meltdown at every level. 

 

Adam’s play merges the personal and the political just as it fuses everyday absurdism with social realist observation. This looks to the metaphorical ridiculousness of Eugene Ionesco as much as the critiques of political posturing in Howard Brenton’s early play, Magnificence. The result in Catriona MacLeod’s archly pitched production is a thoughtful but still entertaining hour that scratches the surface of current global concerns to get to the human drive behind those who stand in opposition.

 

Laura Harvey plays Sarah with the manic edge of someone trying to fill a void left by the loss of a loved one. Alice Glass as Scarlet too has a drive about her channelled from something deeper than pure politics. For all the sit-com style comic sparring between the two in the play’s first half as they navigate their way through a transformed environment, once Betty Valencia’s Judyth arrives, an increasingly serious air takes hold. A word as well for designer Heather Grace Currie, who somehow manages to capture the monumental heart of the matter in an urgent little study of a natural disaster in waiting.


The Herald, April 10th 2025

 

ends

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