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GUSH

Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh 

Four stars

 

Ally is a woman pregnant with possibilities as much as with child throughout Jess Brodie’s new play, a solo piece wonderfully performed by Jessica Hardwick. As Ally prepares to be a first time mum, she feels like she is about to burst on several levels. As well as navigating her way through an increasingly stifling home life with her husband Kevin, this woman’s work also includes an illicit date with a female sex worker in a Cambuslang hotel. 

 

What follows in Ally’s monologue is an exploration of her sexuality that liberates her even as it leads her into temptation beyond her humdrum home life. This sees Brodie’s script tap into the erotic psychology of a woman whose body has been taken over, but which has left her with a deep rooted yearning that needs to be acted on. 

 

The sound of a heart beating pulses the opening of Becky Hope-Palmer’s production. On stage alone for the play’s seventy-five minute duration, Hardwick paces Becky Minto’s dazzling white set, part cushion lined boudoir, part heavenly retreat. As she delivers Brodie’s spare, unadulterated text, her sexually charged first world confessional can sound at points like a piece of old school erotica.

 

This doesn’t take away from the seriousness of Ally’s personal voyage into enlightenment, right up to when she goes into labour at the most inopportune of moments. This is held together by Hardwick with a mix of wit and wonder that is punctuated by Niroshini Thambar’s evocative sound design. As Ally comes to terms with the woman she is only just becoming, her passion evolves into something gloriously undefined in a richly realised dramatic invocation of love and lust without limits.


The Herald, April 16th 2026

 

ends

 

 

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