"Being at home is also about being not at home," one of the four women in Nicola McCartney's new play notes. And so it is in this dark, tangled vision of life in the family homestead: claustrophobic as soon as you step in the door, even if it has been years; stifling, dusty and instantly familiar.
Like a matriarchal update of Pinter's The Homecoming, this one-act play has a similar structure and nearly as dark a mood. Jen (Gillian Kerr), a successful Edinburgh lawyer with the chance of a job abroad, comes to visit her mother and sister. What she finds is bleak dysfunction: an alcoholic mother, walking with a stick after her "accident" and stuck in a fantasy world of country songs and sad lyrics of broken lives; and her sister, the bird-like Jo (Kate Dickie), an Asperger's Syndrome sufferer almost entirely removed from social interaction. Jo is obsessed with time and routine, and can't cope with questions. Providing a rather heavy-handed symbol for what is wrong with all these women's lives, she is initially the play's tragic figure but by the end brings its only note of optimism.
On narrative, character and emotional truth, McCartney is a true talent, especially in the way she draws the two older women, Annie and her sister Kath. Mary McCusker and Hope Ross's performances in these roles are just the right blend of self-knowledge and delusion. McCartney has a deft touch too in portraying the deeper, darker side of family life; the layers of resentment and disappointment waiting to spill out across the generations.
The set, designed by Minty Donald, underlines this sense of a flood of emotional bile bubbling under the surface. It's like a scene from the children's programme, Haunted House: a dusty corner of a neglected pile, a house but emphatically not a home.
The play is less successful in its attempts to portray what the women are going through psychologically. Sometimes they speak individually in staccato fragments ("just-enough-room-to-move-my-arms"), at other times they talk in a round, building a sentence between them. This device drags the play away from its strong and convincing emotional core and feels forced, pretentious. "Wave wave wave waves," Jo says twice. The play already has currents and characters overwhelming enough to sweep us away; such linguistic play feels as out of place as the four women do in their home.
Touring Scotland until 5 March
