Chirpy Anna hasn’t left home for months; she’s stopped eating and she is smashing her flat up bit by bit. The floorboards will be next to go. Rebecca is so furious that her ex-partner has found a new love that she turns that anger on herself. Samantha is struggling to become Sam, to look in the mirror and really see herself, the real person inside.
This trio’s individual lives and the way they overlap, spark and fitfully connect provides the framework for Swallow, Stef Smith’s bloody great bruise of a play which borrows, magpie-like, from Sarah Kane but which is always distinctively itself. It has a shard-like lyricism that tears through the heart. It finds the comic in the tragic.
In some ways this might be seen as a companion piece to Bryony Kimmings and Tim Grayburn’s Fake It ’Til You Make It. That’s about male depression. Smith’s play suggests that the girls are not alright either, as they try to deal with the fallout and pressure of daily life, the steady accumulation of small bruises until one day you think that you cannot go on and retreat back in on yourself. If there is a more potent image of the sheer bloody loneliness of city life than two people trying to communicate through a closed door, I haven’t seen one. It’s good on guilt too, that corrosive drip-drip that makes you think everything might be your fault.
It doesn’t all work. It needs to pare back on the metaphors, and in the final 10 minutes Orla O’Loughlin’s otherwise pitch-perfect production pushes the hesitant optimism of the piece into something more sentimental and less interestingly provisional. But Sharon Duncan-Brewster, Anita Vettesse and Emily Wachter are all utterly compelling, and at its best this is a shattering 80 minutes about finding a way to cling on for dear life, muddle through and survive – but survive better.
• At the Traverse, Edinburgh, until August 30. Box office: 0131-228 1404.
