Skip to main content

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

 

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Myra Mcfadyen - An Obituary

Myra McFadyen – Actress   Born January 12th 1956; died October 18th 2024   Myra McFadyen, who has died aged 68, was an actress who brought a mercurial mix of lightness and depth to her work on stage and screen. Playwright and artistic director of the Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh, David Greig, called McFadyen “an utterly transformative, shamanic actor who could change a room and command an audience with a blink”. Citizens’ Theatre artistic director Dominic Hill described McFadyen’s portrayal of Puck in his 2019 production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre in London as “funny, mischievous and ultimately heartbreaking.”   For many, McFadyen will be most recognisable from Mamma Mia!, the smash hit musical based around ABBA songs. McFadyen spent two years on the West End in Phyllida Lloyd’s original 1999 stage production, and was in both film offshoots. Other big screen turns included Rob Roy (1995) and Our Ladies (2019), both directed by Mi...
2 comments
Read more

Losing Touch With My Mind - Psychedelia in Britain 1986-1990

DISC 1 1. THE STONE ROSES   -  Don’t Stop 2. SPACEMEN 3   -  Losing Touch With My Mind (Demo) 3. THE MODERN ART   -  Mind Train 4. 14 ICED BEARS   -  Mother Sleep 5. RED CHAIR FADEAWAY  -  Myra 6. BIFF BANG POW!   -  Five Minutes In The Life Of Greenwood Goulding 7. THE STAIRS  -  I Remember A Day 8. THE PRISONERS  -  In From The Cold 9. THE TELESCOPES   -  Everso 10. THE SEERS   -  Psych Out 11. MAGIC MUSHROOM BAND  -  You Can Be My L-S-D 12. THE HONEY SMUGGLERS  - Smokey Ice-Cream 13. THE MOONFLOWERS  -  We Dig Your Earth 14. THE SUGAR BATTLE   -  Colliding Minds 15. GOL GAPPAS   -  Albert Parker 16. PAUL ROLAND  -  In The Opium Den 17. THE THANES  -  Days Go Slowly By 18. THEE HYPNOTICS   -  Justice In Freedom (12" Version) ...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Passage – Hip Rebel Degenerates: Black, White and Red All Over

Prelude – The Power of Three   Fear. Power. Love. This life-and-death (un)holy trinity was the driving force and raisons d’être of The Passage, the still largely unsung Manchester band sired in what we now call the post-punk era, and who between 1978 and 1983 released four albums and a handful of singles.    Led primarily by composer Dick Witts, The Passage bridged the divide between contemporary classical composition and electronic pop as much as between the personal and the political. In the oppositional hotbed of Margaret Thatcher’s first landslide, The Passage fused agit-prop and angst, and released a song called Troops Out as a single. The song offered unequivocal support for withdrawing British troops from Northern Ireland.    They wrote Anderton’s Hall, about Greater Manchester’s born again right wing police chief, James Anderton, and, on Dark Times, rubbed Brechtian polemic up against dancefloor hedonism. On XOYO, their most commercial and potentially mo...
Post a Comment
Read more