Caitlin Skinner

Until It’s Gone

28/02/23

Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh

This sprightly two-hander packs a lot into its fifty-minute running time. Until It’s Gone is the first of 2023’s A Play, a Pie and a Pint offerings, and it’s a corker: Alison Carr’s tight and cleverly-crafted script imagines a future where all of womankind have disappeared, and men are left to make the best of a world without them. In stark contrast to Charlotte Perkins-Gilman’s Herland, where women have created a female Utopia, this male-only Scotland is a dystopian mess, its citizens desperate for the women to return from their unspecified and unexplained exile.

We’re offered a glimpse into this terrifying scenario through a simple park-bench, chalk-and-cheese set-up: a meeting between an eager young man of twenty-five (Sean Connor) and a gruff older one (Billy Mack). They’ve been matched by a supposedly ‘world-beating’ app, but this is not a date – or at least, not a conventional one. They are two avowedly heterosexual, cis-gendered men, following a strict government mandate to ‘connect’ – because things aren’t sustainable as they are. Through this smallest of microcosms, Carr seeds just enough information into the men’s darkly comic dialogue to allow us to envisage the bigger picture, the tortured society in which they live, where schools are closed, most interactions happen online, and everything feels wrong.

The characters are beautifully realised, played with warmth and humour by Connor and Mack, even as they expose the men’s real pain. The generational divide is deftly managed, the initial chasm between them narrowing as they talk and share confidences, slowly realising that they’re more alike than not, that their shared fate should bind them rather than pull them apart.

Under Caitlin Skinner’s assured direction, the play’s political points are clearly made without ever feeling intrusive. I like the cheeky use of tableaux and blackouts to mark the passage of time at the beginning, and the set – by Gemma Patchett and Jonny Scott – is modest but strikingly effective. I’m especially drawn to the myriad images of women adorning the tumbledown walls, and find myself wondering if they are ‘missing’ posters or simply photos, there to remind the men of what they’ve lost.

Because, of course, you never know until it’s gone…

4.4 stars

Susan Singfield

Five From Inside

21/04/20

Traverse Theatre YouTube

We were looking forward to Donny’s Brain at the Traverse, but then along came a global pandemic to scupper our plans. Enter writer Rona Munro, director Caitlin Skinner and the rest of the cast and crew with a plan to fill the gap: a series of five short monologues, free to view on the theatre’s YouTube channel.

Thematically, we’re in all too familiar territory: one way or another, the characters are all trapped, either physically incarcerated or marooned within their own introspection. It’s a ghastly reminder of the zeitgeist.

First up, there’s Jacob (Bhav Joshi), who’s literally locked up: he’s in prison, desperately seeking help from his brother. The off-kilter camera angles create a sense of panic and disorientation; his fear is palpable. Next comes twitchy Fern (Lauren Grace), who’s also being kept against her will, apparently in some kind of clinic. She’s struggling to ‘colour her mood’ correctly with her crayons. ‘I’m normal,’ she keeps insisting, frantically trying to banish her demons.

Mr Bubbles (Michael Dylan) is a children’s entertainer whose career is on the line after an embarrassing live TV bust-up with his partner; he’s trapped in his character, wiping at his make-up, trying to reveal the self below. And Siobhan (Roanna Davidson) is locked in a cycle of resentment against an employer who ostracises her, and refuses to recognise her contribution to the firm’s success.

My favourite of the five is the last one, Clemmy, performed by Suzanne Magowan (last seen by Bouquets & Brickbats in the thought-provoking Fibres), which takes the form of a filmed confession from a mother to her young daughter. She’s caught in a web of her own lies, and her anguish is heartbreaking. The back story is tantalising; this clearly has the potential to be developed into a longer piece.

But there’s no weak link here, and an astonishing tonal mix, considering the self-limiting nature of the project. Although each one is a stand-alone, they work best when viewed together, a series of lives connected by a sense of isolation.

Available until 9pm on 2nd May, these vignettes are well worth fifty minutes of your time.

3.8 stars

Susan Singfield

Hope and Joy

01/11/19

Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh

Ellie Stewart’s Hope and Joy is a quirky, absurdist piece of whimsy, set in a near future where environmental change has wrought a radical shift in nature. A shift so radical, in fact, that the opening scene shows Hope (Kim Gerard) giving birth to an egg. The father is a Whooper swan, we learn, and her son, Magnus (Ryan Havelin), a human-swan hybrid – costumed, delightfully, in a fabulous winged hoody. Hospital cleaner Joy (Beth Marshall) sees the boy’s ability to fly as a definite plus-point, but – as he grows up – the kids at school are less accepting of his differences. Hanging out with a gang of dissolute pigeons only makes things worse, and Magnus soon realises he needs to spread his wings (sorry…), and seek the company of others who are more like him.

It’s a fun play with some serious points underlying the humour, such as the letter Joy receives regarding her mum’s social care. The melting ice caps are, of course, a real cause for concern, and this fantastical imagining of where we might end up serves to highlight how unknown and precarious our planet’s future is. Themes of friendship, parenthood, otherness and isolation are also clear throughout, although rather superficially explored.

Becky Minto’s set is as wonderful as you might expect if you’ve seen her work before: a jagged white hospital bed/house/pole -dancing stage surrounded by stark black tree trunks. Caitlin Skinner’s direction is lively and dynamic, and – for the most part – works in harmony with the set, although I’m not convinced by the actors crouching off-stage, half-hidden in the woods; I think they need to be either properly concealed or more explicitly visible.

The performances are strong: Gerard and Marshall inhabit their roles effectively, creating bold, sympathetic characters, and Havelin is engagingly awkward as the diffident teenage bird-boy. The section in the pole-dancing club is less believable however: it’s an interesting twist, but the posing and spinning need to be more carefully choreographed, and delivered with more precision and control if they’re to be convincing.

Hope and Joy is throughly entertaining and an absolute pleasure to watch: an enjoyable way to spend an hour.

3.4 stars

Susan Singfield