Riotous midlife romcom with a sex scene you won’t forget...
Midsummer (Mercury Theatre, Colchester, then Barn, Cirencester) Verdict: A lost weekend worth finding ★★★★☆
IT’S good to fall in love with a set, even more if it helps tell the story. For David Greig’s tale of a disreputably memorable weekend in Edinburgh, Libby Todd has built a doll’shouse mash-up of the Old Town: tenement and mansion, cathedral and bridges. They open and shut, show sudden projected messages and are scrambled over for two hours of swooping, darting adventure in a fresh-hearted romcom about two midlife disappointments solidifying into love.
Lawyer Helena (Karen Young) is stood up by her married lover and picks up Bob (Ross Carswell). He once dreamed of busking through Europe, but actually works for a car thief. They are both 35, and decide to hook up and get so drunk they’ll forget it.
Expect the funniest, truest, most excruciatingly recognisable sex scene of the year, followed by a unique moment in which Bob, alone and still drunk, is given a severe talking-to by his own willy (played with deadpan irritability by narrator Will Arundell in a rubber hat). The disapproving appendage complains that it’s tired of stupid, pointless adventures and strange partners, and wants stability.
Gordon McIntyre’s songs drive the tale along with dry rock-ballad lyrics: ‘Gimme darkness, gimme pain, and take it all away!’, as the two narrators and the lovers nimbly snatch up guitar, flute, saxophone or fiddle.
They meet again, she in a bridesmaid dress with sick on it, he nervously clutching £15,000 of his boss’s money in a plastic Tesco carrier bag. Stumbling and talking in the granite mazes of the old city, they find comradeship.
Greig writes with tender delicacy — always a prose poet, no syllable wasted — as he leads a disorderly progress between cafés, benches, arches, an IKEA car park and a Japanese fetish nightclub. The narrators add miniature lectures on brain science, but beautifully — as the sun at last breaks through the fog — it’s love that makes sense.
■ Until May 18 (mercurytheatre. co.uk); then at co-producers Barn Theatre, Cirencester, May 22-June 22 (barntheatre.org.uk).