I don’t think Frances Poet intends her play to be depressing. She has a dry wit, a vigorous way with words and moments of theatrical exuberance that point away from that. But she doesn’t make things easy. Still, the Traverse’s flagship Edinburgh festival show, involves a woman housebound with chronic pain, a man in the closing moments of dementia and a couple with a stillborn baby. And let’s not forget the dog that has to be put down.
“It’s so we can empathise. With your pain,” says Martin Donaghy’s Dougie, joining in with his partner’s contractions in an NCT class. But like all the characters, he can never experience someone else’s suffering, any more than they can communicate what it’s like to go through it.
The closest the play comes to redemption (or pain relief) is a powerful speech about life being worth its agonies. But a play about terminal illness can go in only one direction and, for all its attempts at closure, it’s hard not to feel deflated.
Poet does, however, give Gareth Nicholls’s company tremendous material to work with and the cast are superb. There’s Molly Innes, sour and implacable as the woman in constant pain. There’s Gerry Mulgrew, wild eyed and eager, as a man whose dementia takes the form of a bender round the pubs of Edinburgh. And there’s Mercy Ojelade, resigned and bottled up as a bereaved mother. Donaghy and Naomi Stirrat, as observers to this suffering, are equally strong, both assertive and unsentimental.
With Oğuz Kaplangi’s live score heightening the air of impending chaos, and a socially distanced staging that adds to the sense of dislocation, it’s a production driven by a life force that belies the gloomy theme.
• At the Traverse, Edinburgh, until 22 August and online, 1–29 September.
