31/10/26

Summerhall, Edinburgh

What better way to celebrate Hallowe’en than to take in four new plays by young writers? As ever, Summerhall is one of the few spaces left in the city that offers such an opportunity. The arts centre is currently under threat of being developed into yet more student accommodation, so please support their appeal to be allowed to continue doing what they do so well.

Trajectories is a presentation by Scottish Youth Theatre: four short one-act plays by early-career artists. In each case the writers also perform their pieces.

First up is The Banshee by Tsen Day-Beaver, which is presented in the Tech Cube. In a tiny flat somewhere in the city, a student, Selia, searches for a thesis question to sum up all her long years of research. But she’s haunted by a series of mystifying dreams and visits from an unknown entity, who seems to be trying to tell her something. Beaver performs the piece with absolute conviction and I love the fact that she provides no easy answers to the central mystery, but leaves it for the viewer to resolve. This is a promising start to proceedings.

After a quick reset, Sean Fullwood presents What We Lost in the Fire. It’s quite literally a campfire tale, with members of the audience invited to sit on crates around a glowing blaze as Fullwood recounts the story of Prometheus and Pandora from the point of view of Prometheus’s lesser-known brother, Epimetheus. The piece is nicely written but we are told rather than shown what happens – and, for those of us outwith the inner circle, there’s a frustrating distancing effect. I’m prompted to think that this piece might be ideally suited to an audio recording but it’s nonetheless an interesting experiment – and one that carries an important ecological subtext.

We move on to the Anatomy Lecture Theatre for the next two plays.

Bury the Soft Things by Cormac Myles is for us the standout piece of the afternoon, with shades of both Shirley Jackson’s The Lottery and Don Siegel’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers. A young man witnesses a homophobic attack in the sleepy Scottish town where he has lived all his life and, in shock, he takes to his heels – though he does manage to grab a packet of biscuits before he flees. Perched on a hilltop overlooking the town, he attempts to take stock of the situation – and begins to realise that the world in which he lives is not as straightforward as it seems. When he gets a phone call from his mother, things take a very sinister turn. Myles submits a compelling performance and there’s a powerful paranoid twist in the tale that delivers a real punch.

Another swift set-change and we’re ready for the final play, Good Night, Ros? by Amy Brennan-Clark, in which the life of a Glaswegian housewife interconnects with the misadventures of a Hollywood ingenue – the presence of the latter signalled by the donning of a pair of long red gloves. Brennan-Clark offers a perky performance in a variety of roles, though she gives herself a tough time my having to inhabit so many different characters (could she perhaps trim down Ros’s three children to just one?) but this concludes with a beautifully sung ballad that brings the showcase to a satisfying conclusion.

All in all Trajectories is a success and a rare opportunity to sample the talents of some new voices in Scottish theatre.

4 stars

Philip Caveney