Subtitled “a play with songs”, this piece by Rochelle Bright was a big hit in her native New Zealand. Whatever resonance it may have had there, and however engaging the music, it doesn’t travel well, and seems little more than an inconsequential, bittersweet romcom about disappointed, small-town dreams.
Starting with the assertion that the story is all true, it shows 18-year-old electrician Eric meeting 16-year-old farm girl Rose at the lake by the daffodils in Hamilton in 1964. They date, go to the movies and the beach, and then Eric, in the midst of a round-the-world trip, suddenly proposes to Rose. All looks set fair for a happy-ever-after life of marital bliss until dark secrets are uncovered about Eric’s adulterous dad – at which point the story, like the relationship, goes off the rails. On the flimsiest circumstantial evidence, Rose decides that Eric is also serially unfaithful. But because it is never made clear whether Eric is the victim of injustice or a dark-hearted Don Juan, it is hard to care about the couple’s subsequent bust-up.
Todd Emerson and Colleen Davis perform with vigour and sing the half-dozen songs well, accompanied by a lively three-piece band. The video background – some of it looking very much like authentic home movies – also helps to root the action in time and place. Although I suspect the show is intended to question the notion of New Zealand as a quiet place in which nothing too sensational ever happens, its final effect is to support rather than subvert the myth.
•In rep at the Traverse, Edinburgh, until 28 August. Box office: 0131-226 0000.
