Gemma Patchett

Babs

14/03/23

Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh

This week’s A Play, A Pie and A Pint is the pithily titled Babs by Morna Young. We’ve enjoyed Young’s work before – Lost at Sea and Aye, Elvis are both excellent examples of Scottish theatre – so we arrive at the Traverse this Tuesday lunch time with high expectations. The set, by Gemma Patchett and Jonny Scott, doesn’t give much away: there are a few fir trees, some pipes, a couple of skulls and a ukelele – an eclectic mix, promising something unusual.

We’re not disappointed.

Bethany Tennick plays Lisa, a troubled young quine from Aberdeen, who lives for her annual holiday with her best pal, Shelley. Apart from that, all Lisa has is her guitar, her tunes and a truckload of attitude. So when Shelley decides she’d rather go away with her new boyfriend, Gareth, Lisa is raging. How dare Shelley ditch her? Desperate and drunk, she signs up for a solo retreat, which turns out to be life-changing, because ‘Babs’, the mysterious host, is none other than Baba Yaga – she of the iron teeth and chicken-legged house… Why has she invited Lisa here?

Young’s decision to write the piece in Doric dialect gives it an urgent authenticity, underscoring Lisa’s need to be true to herself, even as she searches for a new identity. She is a bold, in-your-face character, and Tennick imbues her with such spark and vim that it’s impossible not to warm to her, even when she’s being completely unreasonable. The songs (composed by Tennick) add an extra dimension, showing us that Lisa has the potential to be more than ‘a sheep’, even if she can’t yet see it herself. The plaintive ode to her mother is especially emotive.

Despite its dark themes, Babs is essentially a comedy, and I spend much of the fifty-minute running time laughing at Lisa’s disproportionate outrage, or at her renditions of the other characters who populate the tale. Director Beth Morton keeps the pace snappy, and every joke lands well with the audience.

I’m fair-tricket to say this is another winner from 2023’s first PPP season.

4.2 stars

Susan Singfield

Burning Bright

07/03/23

Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh

This latest season of A Play, A Pie and A Pint promises to be a good ‘un. Hot on the heels of last week’s sprightly Until It’s Gone comes Burning Bright, Áine King’s apocalyptic depiction of the climate crisis engulfing us. It’s no surprise to learn that this play won the 2022 David MacLennan award: it’s evocative and visual, a big story told in small fragments, as economical as poetry.

We are presented with three disparate narratives, linked by an over-arching theme of environmental collapse. Suzanne Magowan is a TV journalist desperately chasing a story about Australian wildfires, more interested in saving her career than in saving the earth. Hannah Jarrett-Scott plays a grief-stricken young woman with an eco-tourism business, taking rich adventurers on her boat, The Ice Princess, to see the polar ice caps before they’re gone. And Adam Buksh is a survivor: he’s escaped floods and tigers in his native India, and now he’s navigating racism on his Glasgow street.

The performances are all strong, the characters compellingly portrayed, and the writing is gorgeously cinematic – the image of a blazing horse, for example, is horribly mesmerising. Roxana Haines (director), Gemma Patchett and Jonny Scott (designers) achieve astonishing things with a tiny stage and a minimal set, so that it’s easy to suspend my disbelief and accept that I am, simultaneously, in the Arctic, Australia, Scotland and India, witnessing fire, floods and melting ice caps.

The conceit works to emphasise the ubiquity and urgency of climate breakdown. Even these characters, closer to the epicentres of disaster than most of us, are each only aware of one aspect of the problem. But here in the audience, we are shown the cumulative effect: their monologues are tangled and entwined, so that we see their interdependence and the extent of the catastrophe that’s looming over us. The image is there throughout, cleverly captured in the juxtaposition of the encroaching wave of plastic waste that dominates the set, and the tiny dinghy representing our precarious position.

Burning Bright is a superbly accomplished piece of theatre, skilfully illuminating why climate change is an issue we can’t afford to ignore.

4.7 stars

Susan Singfield

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