Breaker
Underbelly
Four stars
Hidden
Underbelly
Three stars
Missing
Underbelly
Three stars
What prompts five children living in an isolated island community to throw themselves off a cliff to their untimely deaths? Does it come from troubled young minds, or are there darker, more mythic forces at play? These are the questions young journalist Danny wants answered when he goes exploring the island's dilapidated schoolroom after dark in Breaker, Graeme Maley's Scots-accented translation of Icelandic writer Salka Gudmundsottir's brooding play.
Danny is chasing his own past, just as local teacher, Sunna is coming to terms with her loss. As their worlds collide, Danny and Sunna skirt around issues that are about more than just themselves before eventually finding some kind of reconciliation.
As with David Greig's play, The Events, Gudmundsottir's play is about a community trying to find closure. Maley's own production of his translation is even more emotionally raw and the consequences of the tragedies even more personal by focusing on just two people.
Iain Robertson strikes just the right balance of gallusness and vulnerability as Danny, and if Isabelle Joss' Sunna threatens to explode into anger too soon, it's merely a sign of the play's emotional floodgates opening in a haunting meditation on how ancient stories can bring some kind of redemption in the modern world.
Until August 26
Six people navigate around each other until some of them actually meet in Hidden, a part sitcom, part romcom written and performed by Laura Lindsay and Peter Carruthers.
It opens with Colin stepping out from the audience and unable to stop himself from jumping in feet first. Then there's James, fantasising about the woman sitting opposite him on the morning train while his wife Nina agonises over a pregnancy test. Claire, Gareth and Cara are similarly keeping their secrets to themselves. The one thing that remains unspoken with all of them is their craving for something resembling love.
First seen at the Lowry in Manchester, Lindsay and Carruthers's play takes a set of well-observed archetypes and gives them a narrative that resembles tan ensemble-based Brit-flick of the 1990s. There is pathos among the laughs in a gentle look at what goes on in the hearts and minds of the people sitting right next to us.
Until August 25
Andrew O'Hagan's journalistic memoir, The Missing, may not have inspired this devised piece by the Young Engineer Theatre Collective, about how easy it is for people to disappear, but the themes and indeed approach are similar in their show, Missing.
Taking as its starting point the disappearance of a child from Coatbridge in the 1950s, plus more recent imagery from the Madeleine McCann case, the company concoct a collage of interviews, recordings and physical tics to explore their subject by way of a set of battleship-grey painted cubes and a quartet of boxes marking out the seasons.
While the company's line of inquiry comes to no conclusions other than what assorted family survivors and policemen can dispassionately reveal, Engineer show promise, if only for attempting to make their way through such a minefield of subject.
However this piece develops, the company would benefit from purchasing a copy of O'Hagan's book.
Until August 25
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules hereComments are closed on this article