It's Only Words

It's Only Words

Oran Mor, Glasgow

MARY BRENNAN

OH dear - what can the matter be? One old lady's locked in the lavatory ... and despite the cajolings, chivvyings and even threats of further action from WPC Hay, this douce old dear isn't giving up the privacy of her cubicle until she's good and ready.

After all, it's for the use of the public, and what does 'convenience' mean if not for the ease and benefit of the user?

Meanings matter to Mrs Moore, and so do words. Even those scribbled on the walls of her ad hoc sanctuary, and for the first few minutes of Sylvia Dow's bitter-sweet play it's the graphic incongruity of Mrs Moore new-found reading matter that gets the laughs.

But as Eileen Nicholas eases us into the highs and lows of Mrs Moore's memories, it becomes clear that words carry lasting weight with a woman who has always lived more adventurously in her imagination than in reality.

As this almost-monologue progresses, one talismanic book - RM Ballantyne's Coral Island (1857) - becomes the leitmotif that links past with present. It's the rattling good tale of castaway adventures that she and Joe (Jamie Frances) squabbled over, as ten-year-olds, in the lending library. And it's the book that inspired raggle-taggle Joe to join the Merchant Navy and see that South Pacific world while she only travelled there, vicariously, through his letters.

These episodes have a nostalgic charm, both in Dow's spot-on period details and in the performances by Frances and Nicholas - she positively glows as she enacts her younger selves. But, as we have already sussed, there are darker reasons why such a perjink, usually inoffensive woman is defying authority in the shape of Kirstin McLean's patient police officer. Even when the final twists veer in unlikely directions, Nicholas keeps us - like her privy confessional in the Ladies - firmly engaged.

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