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Inexperience

Pitlochry Festival Theatre

Four stars 

 

Electricity is in the air when Robin meets Iris at a 1990s student party for her 21st birthday. As opposites attract, the pair find common ground of sorts over a broken guitar displayed like a trophy. What might have ended up as one night of drunken passion becomes something else when the pair make a vow never to touch. 

 

Thirty years later, and what was an unforgettable moment for him and one more rash promise for her brings Robin and Iris together once more. As their worlds collide in a courtroom cafe where both are involved in the consequences of actions not of their making, their criss-crossing lives catch up with each other across generations and wake up something in both of them.

 

What initially looks like an extended episode of what might be styled as This Mid Life in the first act of Douglas Maxwell’s emotionally ambitious play gradually evolves into something more expansively contemporary in the second. Robin’s buttoned up awkwardness is in sharp contrast to Iris’s ebullient spontaneity in Maxwell’s meticulously constructed script. These contrary personalities are established first in Sally Reid’s production by Alexander Tait and Sophie Fortune as the duo’s younger selves before Sandy Grierson and Adura Onashile show how they turned out not that different to how they started once they grew up. 


This leaves Tait and Fortune to act out assorted mentees, activists and extended family in  the sort of complex inter-personal drama that used to appear on the stage with stately regularity. As Robin and Iris skirt around each other like a two way Reiki healing session painted by Leonardo Da Vinci, Maxwell focuses on the eternal possibilities of intimacy in a touching display that sees the couple learn to connect in a beautifully realised display of what it means to be human. 


The Herald, June 20th 2026

 

ends

 

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