A LOST WEEKEND WORTH FINDING
It helps if you happen to fall in love with the set; much more if the set helps inform the story. For this story of a louche, tender, disreputably memorable weekend in Edinburgh, Libby Todd has constructed 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 2 hours of swooping, darting adventures; an excellent backdrop to David Greig’s louchely lovely rom-com the place drifting midlife disappointments come collectively and solidify into love.
Lawyer Helena (Karen Young) is let down by her married lover and scared to do a being pregnant take a look at; making an attempt 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 desires of busking by means of Europe, however in the meantime works for a bullying car-thief gangster known as Big Tiny Tim.
Gordon McIntyre’s songs drive their story together 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 carried out by two wry narrators and the lovers themselves, all 4 nimbly snatching up guitar, flute, saxophone or fiddle because the story unfolds. The pair are each 35, misplaced dissatisfied souls, and the night time they meet assume the reply is to get drunk and hook up .
Expect the funniest, truest, most excruciatingly recognizable intercourse scene of the 12 months, adopted by a singular second wherein Bob, alone and nonetheless drunk, is given a extreme talking-to by his personal willy (performed with deadpan irritability by the narrator Will Arundell , popping up beside him in a rubber hat). The disapproving appendage says it’s bored with silly , pointless adventures and unusual companions and desires stability.
The pair meet once more, she in a ridiculous bridesmaid costume with sick on it after by chance sabotaging her respectable sister’s marriage ceremony, he nervously clutching £ 15,000 of his boss’s cash in a plastic Tesco provider bag with the financial institution closed. Suffice to say that stumbling and speaking and discovering extra dodgy firm within the granite mazes of the previous metropolis, they discover each other. Greig’s writing, as they progressively uncover each other’s dissatisfied selves , has a young delicacy – he’s fairly a prose poet, no syllable wasted – however by means of that wet day and disorderly night time he in the meantime main them, and the troublesome Tesco bag, between cafés, benches and bridge arches, from Oddbins to a Japanese fetish nightclub and an IKEA automobile park. The narrators intersperse moments like miniature Ted talks on human improvement and the character of decision-making. And superbly, because the solar ultimately breaks by means of the foggy Edinburgh haar, love is smart. final present for the AD , Ryan McBride, as he leaves this beautiful theatre for the freelance world, after 5 superb years.
mercurytheatre.co.uk to 18 May
then co-producers:
barn theatre cirencester 22 May – 22 June
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