Peter Arnott’s elegiac new play is suspended between past and future. The past is represented by Will (Robbie Scott), a dead child whose ghost haunts the gorgeous Perthshire summer home where his father, George Rennie (John Michie), a headstrong academic, has gathered friends and family for a party. It is the run-up to the Scottish independence referendum of 2014 and change is in the air.
The future is there in the form of Charlie (Matthew Trevannion), George’s former student turned charismatic TV pundit. Taking delight in goading liberals, he is a contrarian who is delighted by the impending apocalypse. Cheerful and cavalier, he predicts an age of environmental collapse that will have no place for the values of fairness and equality he hears around the dinner table.
Set against his cynical prognosis is the unfulfilled artistic promise of Will, who stalks the stage in jerky movements, accompanied by crackling lights and half-recollected conversations. The dead boy symbolises not only the emotional void in the relationship of his parents (Deirdre Davis as mother Edie can barely speak to her husband) but also the end of an era. He is both elusive and emotive, just like the great political causes championed by his father’s generation, from the Cold War to Scottish devolution.
In this way, the play is not about the yes/no debate that animated Scottish society nearly a decade ago, even if Arnott gives his characters some compelling arguments for and against independence – rather it is a Chekhovian attempt to capture a political turning point. Like the work of the turn-of-the-century portraitist Valentin Serov, whom daughter Emma (Sally Reid) adores, the play is a view of a middle-class literati unknowingly on the brink of social upheaval.
It is rich and ambitious stuff and, in David Greig’s good-looking production in collaboration with Edinburgh’s Royal Lyceum, fluidly staged and strongly performed by a company of nine on Jessica Worrall’s bold highland set. But there is also something ungraspable about it, its heart slipping out of view behind a two-hour drama that feels as though a longer play is trying to get out. Or perhaps, like the Chekhov comedies it recalls, it is simply ahead of its time, waiting for the perfect moment to land.
At Pitlochry festival theatre until 28 September. At Royal Lyceum, Edinburgh, 4–14 October.
