Many people hate spoilers. If you’re one of them please look away now. Because it is hard not to talk about Glenna Morrison’s play without saying how weird the ending is.
What we get until the closing moments is a non-story about a single mother, Guffy, who is lured away from her infant daughter to party with friends for the night. She leaves the child with her bedridden adoptive mother, Alba. That the older woman is scarcely able to look after herself is a warning sign. On Guffy’s return home to Alloa from Glasgow, she finds her daughter dead and takes her anger out on Alba.
So far so predictable, but just as the play has appeared to end, we hear a newsflash. Guffy’s attack on Alba, it claims, came as a consequence of the trauma of a stillbirth. The baby was never alive. Nothing we have seen for the previous hour has been what it seemed. Were both women fantasising?
It doesn’t just add a twist, it creates a whole new story. And it is one that would have been more fruitfully told if we had been given the withheld information in the first place.
The delayed revelation is symptomatic of a two-hander that has no sense of the dramatic. Guffy and Alba rarely interact. Instead, they deliver rambling monologues that suggest the real action of the play is happening somewhere else. That Alba insists on singing every last verse of her favourite traditional songs only adds to the air or inconsequentiality. The show’s claim to be an “allegorical tale of the state of our nation” provides no more of an explanation.
Georgia Blue Ireland gives an abrasive performance in the title role with suitably sour support from a bedbound Ceit Kearney, but the play would need more than strong actors to reveal its dramatic heart.
