Survival and despair as the world’s climate collapses
THEATRE
The Scent Of Roses Royal Lyceum
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I’m Dissolving My Love In A Bath Of Acid
Oran Mor, Glasgow
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Television drama is currently suffering from a surfeit of series triggered by the earthshatteringdiscoveryofinfidelity in a middle-class marriage. None of the writers involved, though, does it quite like the astonishing Zinnie Harris, who in her new play The Scent Of Roses – which opens the spring season at the Lyceum – uses her opening scene, in which a woman takes her faithless husband hostage in order to force an honest conversation with him, as the springboard for a dazzling La Ronde-type sequence of six linked conversations, escalating towards an all-too-credible pre-apocalyptic image of a world without truth, spiralling helplessly into full-blown climate collapse.
The five characters who carry this tale are all superb creations, each perched on a knifeedge between survival and despair.
Luci and Christopher, the opening couple – played in fine style by Neve Mcintosh and Peter Forbes – are both exhausted by a marriage built on half-truths and concealment. Their daughter Caitlin, played with hair-raising force byleahbyrne,isafrighteninglyshambolicproductoftheage of false narratives, inventing new realities at will.
Clutching a dead bird she claimstohavekilled–although birds often fall dead from the sky, in the extreme Scottish heatwave that pervades the play – Caitlin confronts a troubled and complicated Saskia Ashdown as Sally, her former schoolteacher, who has a severe alcohol problem, and a fatalattractiontoherex-pupil.
Sally, in turn, throws herself on the mercy of her mother Helen, who leads school projects on environmental education while knowing it’s too late. Helen, played with great wit and presence by Maureen Beattie, is probably the most grounded and cheerfully ironic of the five characters; she also happens – as the circle closes – to be Christopher’s long-term lover.
Harris’s direction is as powerful and pointed as her writing,tompiper’sbigsetisatour deforceofshiftingspaces,dazzlinglylitbybenormerod;and taken as a whole, the play presents an image of five characters on the edge of extinction that’s as poignant as it is disturbing,andalso–inthatinimitablehumanway–sometimes very funny, even in the face of denial and disaster.
DC Jackson’s new Play, Pie and Pint drama, by contrast, takes a bracingly short and absurdist view of human natureanditspretensions.i’m Dissolving My Love In A Bath Of Acid is Jackson’s first stage play in eight years, a brief and hilarious pitch-dark comedy aboutapril–whohasmarried aserialkillerduringhisprison sentence,andisnowintending to live with him following his unexpected release – and her sister and flatmate May, who is not too happy about this arrangement.
The serial killer, Davidjohn, turns out to be the mildest of men, anxious to put his murderous “bad patch” behind him; but April, herself no mean psychopath, has other ideas, and in no time the stage is knee-deep in acid baths and dissolved human remains.
Lacedthroughoutwithjackson’s inimitable brand of verbal wit, the play is delivered with huge panache by Alison O’donnell,ireneallan,andthe inimitable Grant O’rourke; in a production by ex-lyceum director Mark Thomson that fairly sizzles with comic energyfromstarttofinish,andacts as a powerful corrosive antidote both to self-pity, and to despair.
The Scent Of Roses is at the Lyceum, Edinburgh, until 19 March. I’m Dissolving My Love In A Bath Of Acid is at Oran Mor, Glasgow, until 12 March, and the Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh, from 15-19 March