Theatre

Mr Noose Tie / Heroes

Wee Red Bar, Edinburgh

Neil Cooper

***

AS its name suggests, Twelve Twelve Theatre is a young Edinburgh-based company whose artistic team this year aims to produce a dozen plays over as many months. This third double bill of short new works takes them halfway to their target. If that says much about the ambition of the company co-led by Saskia Ashdown and Andrew Cameron, the plays go further.

Mr Noose Tie is Jim Rennie’s absurdist yarn concerning a man who is forced to roleplay his own suicide attempt as part of a public experiment. Bit part players in Rennie’s psychological romp through Mr Noose Tie’s state of mind include his Kafkaesque boss and a woman in a bunny outfit. Overseen by a steely doctor off the leash and a deadpan bouncer called Huge Philip, the heart of things can be found with the woman he possibly still loves. What emerges in Ashdown’s brisk production is a self-reflective matter of life and death which, in its plea for second chances, falls somewhere between Monty Python and Pirandello.

If Rennie’s play is larger than life, Heroes by Gemma McGinley is an exquisite exercise in intimacy, in which life-long friends Penny and Lewis must face up to some life-changing grown-up stuff beyond the game of hop-scotch they mark time with at the start of the play. There’s a lovely chemistry between Rachel Flynn as Penny and Adam Greene as Lewis in McGinley and Connel Burnett’s production, which sees them bat McGinley’s spare script across pivotal moments of the pair’s mutual pasts in a series of bite-size scenes. Funny, touching and beautifully accomplished in its portrait of kindred spirits, like the game of hopscotch that opens it, McGinley’s play shows how easy it is to take a tumble when you don’t know where you might land.