When site-specific theatre company Grid Iron last occupied a conventional theatre space, with Variety at the King's for the Edinburgh Festival, it was pointed out that the subject matter meant they were still faithful to their ethos.
The same might be said for the rather different experience of Ella Hickson's new play, which is deliberately opaque about the boundaries between the "real" life of playwright Kate Bane and the use she is making of it in her writing for the stage.
So the versions we see of her parents Ike and Nessa (Anne Kidd and Sean Scanlan), boyfriend Albin (Nicky Elliott), and indeed herself, are as much from her memory and imagination as "true" characterisation by Hickson.
This "play-within-a-play" structure is rather more playful than it sounds, in what is really another tilt at the coming-of-age drama – albeit the age here is 30, when, we are persuaded, a woman's worries are at some sort of peak. On a beautifully constructed set (by Becky Minto) that resembles a Christian Boltanski art installation, where personal artefacts are stored in file boxes, Ben Harrison's production faithfully pursues Hickson's exploration of how we torment and trick ourselves, sometimes blaming others or beating ourselves up.
The cast, and particularly Jenny Hulse in the title role, rise bravely to moments of deliberately heightened performance and (less successful) repetition of lines as the on-stage playwright explores nuances of meaning.
At times a sitcom, then a drawing-room comedy, then torrid kitchen sink, Hickson even includes a Shavian exchange between father and daughter about class. In an Edinburgh play about memory and fictions, titling the (unseen) work of the twice-fictional Kate Bane "Tramlines" is a nice irony, even if it does turn out to be about tennis.
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