‘A love story in the great tradition’
Midsummer sends you away happy. Just don’t ask about ‘ever after’
Midsummer is a winning quirky show – almost a romantic comedy, almost a musical. It begins with two young Scots named Helena and Bob, meeting cute in an Edinburgh bar. They’re both 35, and think this means that they’ve reached a midlife crisis point. Others might argue that they’re too young for it; others still that they’re too old, as they’ve probably been in crisis mode since nursery school.
Both are dissatisfied with their lives, with their work and with their relationships or the lack thereof. Helena has just been stood up by her married lover. A divorce lawyer by trade, she probably regards this as par for the course. Bob is a small-time crook, who has failed to make a delivery and is fearful of how his boss will react.
He attracts Helena’s attention across a crowded room by reading Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground – though not necessarily her approval. His choice of reading suggests that Bob once had loftier ambitions, and indeed we learn that he once wanted to be a poet. Only when that failed to pay off did he take to running errands for local gangs. He says later that he reads Dostoevsky to cheer himself up. This may be a first.
We take it for granted that Helena and Bob, well lubricated, will fall into bed; the question then becomes whether they will fall into love. Of course we want them to, while also hoping that the show will spare our blushes by not getting too obvious or sentimental about it. The characters themselves have similarly mixed feelings.
Midsummer is billed as “a play with songs.” The play-part – the dialogue – is by David Greig, probably Scotland’s foremost current playwright, known here among other things for The Cosmonaut’s Last Message to the Woman He Once Loved in the Former Soviet Union. The songs are by Gordon McIntyre. The most show- offy of them, in which Bob and Helena compete to find synonyms for their terrible next-morning hangovers, suggests that the knack of writing list-songs has been lost; it just isn’t tight enough. But a number that Bob sings both to and about his incorrigible post-Helena erection is highly original, and also dramatically functional, pointing to all being not yet over.
The song, in being hilariously frank about sex, fits right in with the script, which has already shown us the couple in bed, recognizably awkward, determined, and – finally – replete. Tamara Bernier Evans’ direction of this scene, and indeed of the whole show, is shamelessly, or maybe I mean shamefully, enjoyable. So are the performances of Carly Street and Brandon McGibbon, who constitute not only the entire cast but the entire band. She plays Helena, he plays Bob, and they both play guitar.
This is by way of being a plot device, as well as being an engagingly theatrical one. It seems that Bob once nursed musical ambitions as well as literary ones; he dreamed of busking across Europe, patriotically performing Jesus and Mary Chain covers. Now it looks as if he actually may be doing it, with Helena as his musical partner (though if she ever expressed such desires, I missed them). The show comes to us as their gig, telling us the story of their relationship, referring to themselves in the first person, and frequently arguing about the details.
One thing about which they, and their title, are in accord: it all happened over Midsummer Weekend, and therefore had every right to be magical. As with time so with place; with streets, parks and especially pubs meticulously named (and with a map in the program) the show is practically a love- letter to Edinburgh – nostalgic for those who know the place, exotic for those who don’t. It’s got into the actors’ blood- streams as well; the accents are perfect, and feed the characterizations. McGibbon slips slyly and sagaciously inside his. Street, resplendently platinum, revels in hers, embracing every mood that comes along. The two also get to play the other people in one another’s lives, irrespective of gender. Since it’s Bob who has the more colourful set of acquaintances, Street gets the better deal here.
There are times when the narration gets too self- conscious for its own good, comparing itself to a Hollywood movie or a standard romantic comedy, with an implicit presumption in its own favour. The truth is there’s been a healthy component of irony in the best romantic comedies, at least since Shakespeare and probably before. It certainly isn’t a 21st-century invention. Midsummer is a love story with a sense of mortality lapping at its edges; that puts it in the great tradition.
It sends you away happy, but don’t ask it about ever after.
Until May 28
IT ALL HAPPENED OVER MIDSUMMER WEEKEND, AND THEREFORE HAD EVERY RIGHT TO BE MAGICAL