Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh
Four stars
The power is failing in Enda Walsh’s play, set in an inner city tower block where a woman called Isla awaits her ticket out of what appears to be a life long stretch in solitary confinement. Is she a princess being held prisoner and in need of rescuing by the hapless Young Man observing her through a bank of screens in another part of the building? Are we witnessing a state sanctioned experiment in human behaviour with both Isla and the Young Man cast as guinea pigs to see how much isolation they will tolerate before doing a runner? Either way, that diminishing power is about a lot more than the shonky electrics that cause the lights to fail and assorted screens to freeze.
First seen in Galway in 2016, Walsh’s play slows down his more recognisable torrent of words to be found from his 1996 breakout hit, Disco Pigs, onwards, for a less frantic if just as elliptical set of exchanges. Not that there is anything sedate about the Glasgow based Shotput company’s Scottish premiere, which is served up in Lucy Ireland and Jim Manganello’s production as a multi-media barrage of sound and vision.
This brings home Walsh’s end of the world narrative triptych that sees Aisha Goodman’s Isla and Alex Austin’s Young Man take a chance on the lottery of life beyond the empty space of Anna Yates’ design. The third part sees the pair back where they started from, but finally in the same room, in the flesh and marked by a real life bond that can never be replicated on screen. Inbetween, dancer Jack Anderson marks out his own limits in a twenty-minute routine pulsed by composer Cat Myers’s electronic score that becomes increasingly frantic as Anderson finds himself unable to pass go.
Walsh’s narrative channels a myriad of dystopian forebears, as if Samuel Beckett’s Happy Days and George Orwell’s 1984 had been rebooted for the machine age where surveillance culture is the norm. Sisyphean echoes of 1960s cult TV drama The Prisoner and George Lucas’ debut film, THX 1138, are also in the mix of this futuristic Frankenstein’s monster of a show. Rob Willoughby’s video design, Emma Jones’ lighting and Garry Boyle’s sound design alongside Myers’ techno score fuse with the on stage action in a powerful and emotive series of set pieces.
When the Young Man and Isla go on the run to a possibly virtual world that exists beyond the city, it recalls the sanctuary of Logan’s Run by way of Ray Bradbury’s short story, The Veldt. And when the pair are reunited, happy to share being alone, it is as desperate an act of everyday physical connection as the one at the end of E.M. Forster’s short story, The Machine Stops.
Goodman and Austin are as committed as Anderson as they too fly solo without a safety net. A word as well for the disembodied voices of experience relayed unseen by Ann Louise Ross, Andy Clark, Pauline Goldsmith and Benny Young.
Walsh’s play may have dropped its subtitle of ‘A Love Story’ since 2016, but in its fusion of the hi-tech and the human it remains a state of art depiction of the pains of confinement and the need to hold on to something beyond it in a dangerous world.
The Herald, November 8th 2025
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