A LOST WEEKEND WORTH FINDING
It helps if you fall in love with the set; even more if the set helps tell the story. For this tale of a louche, tender, disreputably memorable weekend in Edinburgh, Libby Todd has built a dolls-house mashup of the Old Town: tenement and mansion, cathedral, bridges and archways. These will open and shut , be lit by sudden projected messages and scrambled over for two hours of swooping, darting adventures; a glorious backdrop to David Greig’s louchely beautiful rom-com where drifting midlife disappointments come together and solidify into love.
Lawyer Helena (Karen Young) is let down by her married lover and scared to do a pregnancy test; trying to be “all perfume and control” she despairingly picks up Bob (Ross Carswell) in a bar. He’s an aspiring storyteller-singer who reads Dostoievsky and dreams of busking through Europe, but meanwhile works for a bullying car-thief gangster called Big Tiny Tim.
Gordon McIntyre’s songs drive their tale along with dry rock-ballad lyrics: “Love will break your heart, sometimes you want it to” and “Gimme darkness, gimme pain, and take it all away!”; the songs are performed by two wry narrators and the lovers themselves, all four nimbly snatching up guitar, flute, saxophone or fiddle as the story unfolds. The pair are both 35, lost disappointed souls, and the night they meet think the answer is to get drunk and hook up .
Expect the funniest, truest, most excruciatingly recognizable sex scene of the year, followed by a unique moment in which Bob, alone and still drunk, is given a severe talking-to by his own willy (played with deadpan irritability by the narrator Will Arundell , popping up beside him in a rubber hat). The disapproving appendage says it’s tired of stupid , pointless adventures and strange partners and wants stability.
The pair meet again, she in a ridiculous bridesmaid dress with sick on it after accidentally sabotaging her respectable sister’s wedding, he nervously clutching £ 15,000 of his boss’s money in a plastic Tesco carrier bag with the bank closed. Suffice to say that stumbling and talking and finding more dodgy company in the granite mazes of the old city, they find one another. Greig’s writing, as they gradually discover one another’s disappointed selves , has a tender delicacy – he is quite a prose poet, no syllable wasted – but through that rainy day and disorderly night he meanwhile leading them, and the troublesome Tesco bag, between cafés, benches and bridge arches, from Oddbins to a Japanese fetish nightclub and an IKEA car park. The narrators intersperse moments like miniature Ted talks on human development and the nature of decision-making. And beautifully, as the sun at last breaks through the foggy Edinburgh haar, love makes sense. A good last show for the AD , Ryan McBride, as he leaves this lovely theatre for the freelance world, after five very good years.
mercurytheatre.co.uk to 18 May
then co-producers:
barn theatre cirencester 22 May – 22 June
theatreCat 