Theatre
Alex & Eliza
Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh
Neil Cooper
Four stars
Meeting your granny for the first time in years can be full of surprises. So it goes for the young man in Umar Butt’s play whose life working in the family corner shop on Sauchiehall Street is leavened both by the banter with his fly Jamaican customer Alex and his excursions into amateur dramatic musicals. With his family away, it is left to him to granny-sit Eliza, who has flown in for what turns out to be a night of surprises and revelations of life and death adventures that took her to the place she learnt to call home.
Umar Butt plays a version of himself in his beautifully realised true story. From his own doorstep, it travels the world in its evocation of the traumas of migration following the partition of India and Pakistan in 1947. Here, the multiple forms of identity that resulted for a young girl who crossed personal and global borders makes her a liberated symbol of a world without walls. At the heart of this is the love story between Eliza and her accidental marriage to another Alex, which leads her eventually to a Glasgow flat and an old harmonium.
All this is delivered in a charmingly engaging fashion in Butt’s own production for the ARC, Stockton, with the first half of his 75-minute opus engaging with the audience as each exchange is punctuated with a song or dance routine. This is just the sucker punch, however, for infinitely more serious things at play.
With Butt playing his own grand-father and Seweryna Dudzinska as Eliza, the play leaps across time as much as Hannah Sibal’s crate-based set. Danny Charles is a versatile foil as assorted extended family members, with the whole thing pulsed along by Laura Stutter’s live sound-scape. The result is a moving of-the-moment evocation, not just of the buried treasure in every family history, but of how events beyond one’s control can shape a life of everyday heroism beyond.
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 here