Òran Mór, Glasgow
Four stars
When Scott meets Jess across a messy dancefloor on an Edinburgh night out, it is lust at first sight. A one-night stand before they both go off to university is all well and good, but what happens next turns both their lives upside down and binds them together forever.
Nathan Scott-Dunn’s new play for A Play, a Pie and a Pint’s lunchtime theatre season taps into the well worn unplanned and often unwanted baby trope that pretty much fuelled the black and white world of so called kitchen sink drama in the 1950s and 1960s. Mercifully things have moved on considerably in Scott and Jess’s twenty first century world, and while the couple’s experience is no less of a shock to them, some kind of happy ending is very much on the cards.
Edoardo Berto’s production opens with Scott and Jess preparing a time capsule type video for their newborn. This framing allows them to rewind their story to its neon lit beginnings all the way up to what appears to be domestic bliss, taking in the assorted stresses and strains that go with their situation en route.
This is given a dramatic kick by the fact that Scott-Dunn’s narrative is told in epic rap like verse that allows Cindy Awor as Jess and Cristian Ortega as Scott to launch themselves into the story with a lyrical largesse that gives the show its heartbeat.
Played out on Heather Grace Currie’s set that doubles up as dancefloor, living room and the supermarket floor where things almost turn to tragedy, Scott-Dunn’s play is delivered with considerable charm by its young cast, who tap into the everyday absurdities they face along with the joys that go with it. The result is a witty look at two people forced to face up to responsibilities for something that in their case at least, becomes the happiest of accidents.
The Herald, April 10th 2026
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