Virginia Woolf, musing on militarism and fascism, famously said that as a woman she had "no country". No nation to defend, no country to die for.
Isabel Wright's short, sharp shock of a play, The Waiting Room, extends this feminist perspective into the present day to look at the lives of two women caught in a modern military conflict. The location is unspecified (though atrocities in Kosovo are referred to in the programme notes), the external conflict serving only as an intense backdrop to their internal drama. This is the psychological torment of war as seen from the private, cramped space the women share. The atmosphere in their safe house is cell-like, with just a bed and a window; the relationship between the two women, Naomi (Anita Vettesse) and Marah (Vivienne de Caris) - a young woman and her dead lover's mother - is like that of prisoners forced together.
They clash and spar, their differences magnified by their predicament. This is convincing writing, showing both women as unlikeably self-obsessed and equally deluded in their contrasting ways of coping. The younger woman dreams her lover is the best of men and still alive; she gets by through fantasising about "men, food and the amazing bath I'll have". Marah, with a weary realism about the evil that men do, is shut down, broken by it all, intolerant of hope.
The drama is the fight between them, the furious, mad, suspicious way they behave with one another, and the gradual realisation that all they have is each other. At little over an hour, it is an uphill struggle to get that sense of locked-in, pent-up resentment but also absolute reliance running between them; it's also hard on a set that might be cramped and basic but, all in new wood, looks like a minimalist Ikea interior. There is also too much walking in circles in an I'm-on-the-verge-look-I'm-pulling-at-my-hair way.
But by the end, this physical and mental torture feels real enough, as Marah reveals the secrets she knows. These are tragic and cruel but, cathartically, free the women from the tyranny of the past and present and maybe release them from the waiting room. A promising offering from this young playwright.
At the Paisley Arts Centre - box office, 0141-887 1010 - tonight.
