Òran Mór, Glasgow
Four stars
Mothers and sons can be a toxic mix. So it goes in Jonny Donahoe’s emotionally charged new play, which will hopefully have a longer life beyond its lunchtime slot as part of A Play, a Pie and a Pint’s latest season and its subsequent Edinburgh and Paisley dates.
When Mark Barrett’s presumably sole son and heir of Blythe Duff’s solitary matriarch turns up unannounced for the first time in eight months, he finds her burning her back pages on a garden bonfire. Given that some of those pages may involve him, this very Zen gesture of purging has an even greater if largely unspoken resonance. Given that the son’s arrival is because he has something to say to help find some kind of impasse beyond their estrangement, this is even more problematic. As the pair attempt to navigate their way around their differences over the next hour in what looks like an extended co-counselling session, some kind of bridges are eventually built.
As Duff and Barrett’s characters spar their way through Donahoe’s ping-ponging dialogue, it is what is left unsaid that gives deadly hints of their lives both together and apart. Amongst the wisecracks that help get them through, hints of childhood trauma and domestic violence rise to the surface without it ever made explicit what exactly happened or why they fell out. Where it would have been easy for Donahoe to have his characters explode into a shouting match to show off the damage, instead, the unresolved and still repressed matter of factness of this mother and child reunion makes for a an affair that simmers with understatement.
Ben Standish’s production adds to the effect by having Duff and Barrett liberated from everyday naturalism on Gillian Argo’s garden set, where a cartoon sky hangs down on a bin that stands like some ceremonial altar. All this adds to the overall awkwardness of the pair’s encounter in a beautifully realised miniature that is possessed with the gravity of something far larger. By the time mother and son find themselves sharing space indoors once more, with past pains binned as much as possible, the home fires burn towards some kind of future.
The Herald, October 8th 2026
Ends
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