Gina Moxley is directing the hugely enjoyable How to Keep an Alien at the Traverse, but she is also a fine playwright and this excellent revival of her 2000 solo piece, originally produced by Fishamble, is tight and compelling. On a fringe where so much solo work seems driven by economics rather than artistic purpose it good to see a show where every element – writing, acting and presentation – are just so. It’s simple stuff, but the quality of the writing and performance shines through and, by God, it packs a wallop.
Amy Molloy plays an unnamed young woman, sitting at a table gluing together the pieces of an old china tea set as if desperately trying to put her own life back together again. Gradually what has happened begins to emerge from her quivering mouth.
She’s a woman with her own uncertainties and fears about the world, who accepted a lucrative job from a family whose elderly mother, Mrs A, moved in with them after a brutal incident. Over the start of the new millennium the family have a pressing engagement on a Caribbean beach, and Mrs A doesn’t want to go; so the young woman moves into the family house to take care of her. But Mrs A has her own very clear plans for the New Year.
The writing is crisp and often beady. The empty affluence of the house is conjured by a description of “a Christmas tree so discreet it could have been June”. It’s truthful, too, on the way the confidence is chipped away from us and the way life leaves us bruised, lonely and afraid.
Molloy gives a perfectly judged performance, containing the emotion until it spills over like a gush of spilled milk, in a production by Sharon Willems that reminds us that sometimes just listening to a story in a darkened room can be the most powerful kind of theatre.
• At Pleasance Courtyard, Edinburgh, until 31 August. Box office: 0131-226 0000.
