Sean Connor

The Legend of Davie McKenzie

11/03/26

Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh

Another lunchtime spent at the Traverse Theatre in the splendid company of A Play, A Pie and A Pint. The Legend of Davie McKenzie is terrific, a reminder of just how rewarding it can be to lose yourself for an hour or so in an affecting piece of drama. Written by Stephen Christopher and Graeme Smith (who last season gave us Dancing Shoes) it’s the story of two hapless youths, stuck on a scheme somewhere in Scotland. They meet as kids in the 1980s and instantly bond – not over football or rugby, but their shared love of iconic action movies. But, even though they dream big, they’ve been born into the wrong lives. They’re destined to fail.

The story is narrated by Sean (Afton Moran), the less confident member of the duo. When we first meet him, he’s in a prison cell, serving out his time for drug offences. Davie (Sean Connor) has been released earlier than his pal and, returning to an empty flat and a cache of hidden drugs, has taken a one-way trip to tragedy. His death doesn’t stop him from returning to the prison, as confident and motor-mouthed as ever, ready to direct Sean through a movie he’s envisaged that will serve as Davie’s memorial. All he needs Sean to do is to find a way to get out of prison fast…

Both leads are superb and they are brilliantly backed by Ruaraidh Murray as an affable prison guard, a terrifying Cockney Geezer and a sympathetic funeral director, flitting between the roles with great skill – at one point he’s even called upon to play a helicopter! Gillian Argos’s set design is a perfect example of simple scenery that can be moved, swapped and manipulated to suggest a whole series of different locations. Director Jake Sleet keeps the momentum at full throttle as the canny script gleefully unleashes a barrage of witty exchanges and legendary film references. Can you spot them all? I think I got most of them…

Which all serves to further highlight the poignancy of the play’s final act, when Sean talks about the cost of losing Davie – what it means when your closest friend in the world steps out of the spotlight and into the darkness.

A word of warning. You may want to have a pack of tissues to hand when Sean raises a fist into the air and Simple Minds strike up a very familiar song…

5 stars

Philip Caveney

Moorcroft

24/10/23

Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh

It’s Garry (Martin Docherty)’s 50th birthday and he’s not in the mood for a celebration. Instead, he prefers to think back to his teenage years and the wee amateur football team he put together with his best friends in Renfrew. He warns us in advance, this isn’t going to be an easy ride…

He assembles his crew. For starters, there’s Mick (Jatinder Singh Randhawa), once a promising member of a junior football team, now plying his trade as a hairdresser. There’s Tubs (Dylan Wood), who is gay – and in a 1980s small town, that’s seriously difficult – and there’s Paul (Sean Connor), struggling to cope with an abusive, alcoholic father. Noodles (Santino Smith) appears to be the most successful of the crew, with a decent job and the money to pay for some fancy football shirts (but should they be that shade of maroon?). Sooty (Kyle Gardiner) is a dedicated mod with a fishtail parka and no higher ambition than to ‘do a Quadrophenia’ and ride his scooter to Brighton, while Mince (Bailey Newsome) has an uncanny propensity for saying the wrong thing at the wrong time… every time.

But from their very first training session, the teammates work well together. The go from strength to strength, finding pleasure in the simple joys of kicking a ball around a pitch. They are blissfully unaware that darker times are inexorably closing in on them.

Moorcroft, written and directed by Elidh Loan, is a fabulous slice of theatre, one that moves effortlessly through a whole series of emotions. It swerves from raucous hilarity to visceral anger to heartrending tragedy with all the sure-footed precision of a well-drilled team. There are superb performances from the entire cast – particularly from Newsome as the slow-witted but oddly adorable Mince – and I especially enjoy the physical sequences as the team leap, twirl and kick their way through a series of energetic routines backed by a selection of 80s bangers. Loan knows exactly when to switch the mood. One minute I’m laughing out loud, the next my eyes are filling with tears.

It would be so easy to dismiss this as ‘a play about football’ but it’s much more than that. Moorcroft is a meditation on masculinity, its strengths, its weaknesses. It’s a reflection on the everyday deprivation of working-class life, and it’s a lament about the awful injustice of fate. Compelling and propulsive throughout, it never once relaxes its powerful grip.

It shoots, it scores. It’s a winner.

5 stars

Philip Caveney

Sean and Daro: Flake It ‘Til They Make It

06/08/23

Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh

Due to circumstances beyond our control, we missed Sean and Daro on its initial release, so we’re delighted to discover it’s having a further run at TravFest 23. And deservedly so. This sprightly tale of two young Glaswegians seeking to become ice cream entrepreneurs finds a delicious sweet spot between comedy and tragedy – and runs with it. And any play that begins with an ode to the wonders of ice cream gets my vote any day of the week.

At his mum’s funeral, the moody and introspective Sean (Sean Connor) bumps into his old pal, Daro (Cameron Fulton), whom he’s lost touch with since going to Uni. Daro is the epitome of the unreliable best friend, the one your mum warns you about: full of ambition and hubris, but lacking anything with which to back it up. But he can talk like nobody’s business. Despite the solemness of the occasion, he’s soon persuaded Sean to use his inheritance – his mother’s flat – as collateral in a new shared enterprise. Together, they will become The Whippy Brothers, joint owners of an ice cream van. They will take to the highways and byways of Glasgow and make a proper killing, selling their sweet-tasting goods to all and sundry. After all, that’s how Duncan Bannatyne started, right?

But the road to success is a distinctly bumpy one – and there are plenty of obstacles they’ll need to navigate on their way…

Laurie Motherwell’s script is packed with hilarious observations and some moments of genuine pathos. Robert Softly Gale handles the direction with skill, giving the eponymous duo plenty of scope to interact with Karen Tennent’s simple but effective set. Connor and Fulton do not so much play their roles as inhabit them. As the spectacularly mismatched pals, they make a brilliant double act.

Anybody looking to leave their worries at the theatre door should seek out Sean and Daro without further delay. This isn’t just a plain cone – it’s served with a flake, a generous dash of sauce and extra hundreds and thousands on top.

4.6 stars

Philip Caveney

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