Traverse Theatre
Four stars
Life is a curse for Sally in Zinnie Harris’ new play, one of the flagship productions of Scotland’s new writing theatre’s Edinburgh Festival Fringe season. Ever since Sally fell down a hole in the road outside the theatre, she’s been having visions. The damage done may be a physical reaction, but it becomes a much bigger metaphor for all the world’s ills that are dragging her and everybody else down into the underworld.
One minute Sally is stuck in the stifling first world politesse of a dead middle class marriage with Richard and all the school runs and liberal concerns that go with it. The next there are frogs at her door, a Greek chorus in her head, and she’s throwing bricks at her bigoted neighbour whose cancer scare she just foretold in-between letting loose her increasing sense of rage.
In Harris’ own production, the play’s obvious debt to the Ancient Greeks sees the play transcend its diaristic beginnings to become a richly expansive outpouring of anger and frustration at the world. At the centre of this on Alisa Kalyanova’s initially stark, ritualistic design is Nicole Cooper as a furious Sally. Her new super powers, as Richard Conlon’s Richard might have it, aren’t exactly welcome for her, but she becomes a force of nature anyway. As she engages with her unseen chorus, however, she finds herself singing in Greek as she spins in Dionysian abandon.
Harris’ own production sees her unbox her dramatic largesse piece by piece to create a call for collective defiance that ends with the international language of music conquering all in a mighty piece of contemporary myth making that makes for a classical gas to be reckoned with.
Until 30 Aug, various times
The Herald, August 9th 2026
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