10/010/23

Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh

Stay, it turns out, is a musical, but lest that word should conjure images of hordes of costumed performers, leaping and gyrating across a stage, let me quickly point out that this is the latest in the Traverse Theatres’s A Play A Pie and A Pint season. It’s a two-hander. But its smallness of scale is more than made up for by its sweet, affecting nature and for the insights it offers into its difficult theme.

Rowan (Craig Hunter) and Kit (Daisy Ann Fletcher) meet up in their favourite corner of the local park. Rowan is carrying an urn containing somebody’s ashes: he’s finally prepared himself for the task of scattering them in the duck pond, but he needs back-up for this grim task and, of course, Kit is there, dressed in her hospital scrubs, ready to make jokes about every aspect of this solemn occasion.

The two of them were once lovers but four years ago something went badly wrong – and yet, somehow, Rowan doesn’t want his current girlfriend here today. For this challenge, Kit is the perfect choice…

Written by Jonathan O Neil and Isaac Savage and directed by Melanie Bell, Stay is a deceptively simple piece, its quirky plaintive songs recounting a poignant story about a relationship gone awry. Rowan is steady and dependable, Kit adorably scatty, forever taking the narrative off in unexpected directions, but together they have something special. Both leads deliver the plaintive, haunting songs with considerable skill and the piece is cunningly written, luring you in with its seemingly innocuous narrative, before heading off into darker territory and deftly delivering a climactic gut punch.

If I wanted to nitpick, I’d say there’s one song too many after that change of direction; nevertheless, Stay is a delightful piece of lunchtime theatre that will make you laugh and cry in equal measure.

4.5 stars

Philip Caveney