Sisters take a train to self-discovery as other lives go underground
Empty Beds (Underbelly Cowgate) Verdict: Clearly a winner ★★★★✩ Lines (Summerhall) Verdict: Telling tales from the Tube ★★★★✩
ACCORDING to Tolstoy: ‘All happy families are alike: each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.’ And that certainly proves to be the case here in Julia Cranney’s Empty Beds for Pennyworth productions. The play sees three sisters catch a train across the country to visit their mentally ill brother Mike on his birthday, only to end up taking an unexpected ride on an emotional rollercoaster along the way.
In this winner of the 2016 Daily Mail Drama Award, set up five years ago to encourage new UK talent to take a show to the Fringe, simmering rivalries boil over, resentments and regrets became part of the lingua franca of the journey, and scoring points off each other seems to be the parlour game of choice to pass the time.
The three sisters in question in Empty Beds are Catherine, Emily and Joanna Wyld. The trio might have grown up under the same roof but each inhabits a different universe now.
Emily has flown the coop, and small town life in Runcorn, to go to college in London. Catherine is a single mum and Joanna, the baby of the three, is still stuck at home with Dad.
This will be the first time all three have been together to see their brother. And once aboard the train (Emily arriving just in the nick of time) it isn’t long before we get a handle on their characters. Emily, who the others chide for her newly acquired ‘posh’ accent, has a laissez-faire attitude to life.
Catherine is a sardonic pragmatist with a scathing tongue, while Joanna is a nervous worry wart who constantly keeps calling the ward in which her twin brother is being held.
Played out on a simple set comprising a couple of second-hand train seats, at first the banter between them gently ebbs and flows between nice and catty.
Catherine is quizzed over the new man in her life. Emily reveals she’s got a new meditation app, much to the hilarity of her sisters.
BUT as the train is delayed, and the visit is in jeopardy, slowly but surely the bombs begin to drop, and the blame game about who has put their brother’s welfare first explodes in bursts of angry recrimination. News that Mike has been put into lockdown only adds fuel to the family feuding.
Playwright and actress Julia Cranney, Matilda Tucker and Carys Wright all turn in sterling performances as the sisters.
And while the blurb for the show points to the play being an indictment of mental health cuts, these are really more of a subsidiary backdrop to the pressures, and guilt, that come with being faced with the choice of having to give over your life to care for that of somebody else. ‘The Tube isn’t something you go to, it’s something you go through. A segue to the next place, but never a destination.’ So says a philosophising, homeless beggar talking in beat poetry, whose story is just one of many to be found in this lively, moving, and intense look at some of the characters to be found scurrying around London’s Underground.
Runner-up in the Scottish Daily Mail Drama Awards, the show from Pangean Productions begins with the excellent ten-strong young cast divided into two sections.
They start off facing each other before boarding the Tube (cubes scattered on the floor that later double up to show the Tube map) and from there the individual stories rattle along. We see a highflying businesswoman contemplating an abortion, a refugee cleaner, a young boy looking for his missing mother, a Northern newbie just arrived in the big smoke.
All are swallowed up in the underground maze London’s increasing population passes through. Slowly but surely, their stories begin to intertwine, we see snapshots of London’s big picture and connections are made. Even the station announcer, caught in the throes of modernising job closures, is losing the plot, cracking bad jokes and playing songs over the tannoy.
As well as the personal stories, larger themes of terror threats are aired here, with a sociological microscope placed on a city stretched to its limits, in this finely crafted and wonderfully executed production.