Pitlochry Festival Theatre
Four stars
Happy families aren’t exactly in abundance in this long overdue revival of Iain Heggie’s care home set play, which sees ageing matriarch Andrene wheeled hither and thither in her confused search for a way out. Instead, what we get is the darkest of Joe Orton style sit-coms that sees Andrene doted on by nurse Larry, only for her errant son Derek and his gobby new girlfriend Kath to turn up. With Andrene’s fortune up for grabs, Larry and Derek have some unfinished business of their own, which at least one of them is about to pay for.
Twenty-five years after Heggie’s play first appeared at Edinburgh’s Traverse Theatre, Sam Hardie’s studio production for Pitlochry Festival Theatre brings this freshly rewritten version to life in slow burning and forensic fashion. This doesn’t take away the intermittent hilarity of Heggie’s meticulously constructed farce, but also highlights some of the bleakness of the situation Derek especially has found himself caught up in.
Everyone here is co-dependant, and no matter how hard they try, they cannot get away from each other. The smallness of the world they occupy is heightened by Jenny Booth’s set, which captures the antiseptic sterility of a place that will never really be home for Andrene and her fellow residents. This is brought into focus by the giant frieze on the wall that suggests a goldfish bowl sized universe where everyone goes round in ever decreasing circles, endlessly forgetting their place within it.
Anne Kidd’s Andrene may be the reason everybody is there, but Johnny McKnight’s Larry, David Rankine’s Derek and Lisa Livingstone’s Kath all have their own little psychodramas bubbling under the brittle surface of their archly delivered exchanges.
While Hardie’s production taps into some of the seriousness beyond some of the play’s deadly one liners, it also reveals just how ahead of the game Heggie was in elevating his classically crafted but filter free form of farce to serious status while all about him were acting in earnest. This mix of light and shade is commonplace now amongst a younger generation of writers, and suggests a need for more revivals of Heggie’s work, from his audacious main stage debut, A Wholly Healthy Glasgow, onwards, to show them how it’s done. An even better idea might be to see some brand new Heggie on Scotland’s stages.
In the meantime, the ending of Wiping My Mother’s Arse is up there with Orton’s Entertaining Mr Sloane in its depiction of entrapment and manipulated desperation. Who ends up wiping up the mess of whom once they get home remains to be seen in a troubling piece of serious fun that even after all these years retains its edge.
The Herald, August 22, 2026
ends
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