Pitlochry Festival Theatre
Four stars
The world doesn’t end in Oliver Emanuel’s play, but sometimes that’s how it feels. Over its bite-size 70-minute duration, Emanuel’s play is a living monument that preserves the emotional paper trails that chart the magic moments of people’s lives. Originally seen in a studio based version in 2024, the play charts the love affair of two people, played here by Alan Cumming and Shirley Henderson, who become arbiters of something eternal that came in the shape of this play.
He is a terminal adolescent who’s just been chucked hard enough to provoke him to spend his nights playing Radiohead at full blast. She is living next door, and puts a postcard through his letterbox to ask him to turn that racket down. When they meet, the rest is history. As we watch them relive their life together, that history is barely contained in a box of old tickets, receipts, a jar of confetti and magical origami creations.
The play was written first as a radio piece in 2016 with composer Gareth Williams, then produced onstage posthumously as a long planned chamber musical following Emanuel’s untimely death in 2023. Williams’ songs, played live here by musical director Gavin Whitworth on a white baby grand piano, pulse the play’s heart.
The big draw here, of course, in Andrew Panton’s upscaled revival - a coproduction between Pitlochry Festival Theatre and original producers Dundee Rep - is that it is the first show PFT’s artistic director Alan Cumming has appeared in since taking up post in 2025. Henderson’s equally starry presence and the onstage interplay between them makes for something even more special.
Shifting the demographic from the young actors who appeared in Panton’s original production to a more mature portrayal works on several levels. Watching a couple of a certain age behave like a pair of teenagers as they recreate how they fell in love is a delight. Cumming’s initial puppy dog demeanour is offset brilliantly by Henderson, whose deadpan delivery is at points hilariously unhinged. Maturity counts in the play’s second half too, as the actors capture the play’s overriding reflective tone when they look back in wonder and sadness at what happened.
All this is played out on Ana Inés Jabares-Pita’s expansive set, a scarred cityscape on which the couple come crawling from the wreckage to act out their past. This alone packs a genuine emotional punch even before what follows. The result is a quietly devastating hymn to loss, and a dramatic elegy to every scrawled-on scrap we hold on to as they acquire ever-greater significance before we have to let it go forever.
The Herald, August 18, 2026
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