Two Sisters
Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh
Neil Cooper
Four Stars
THEY don’t make summers like they used to in David Greig’s new play, which plops its title characters in the Fife caravan park where they holidayed as teenagers. Amy is on the run from a volatile home life that sees her channelling all her lost dreams of becoming a rock singer into serial adultery. Emma is a lawyer in retreat, with notions of writing a novel. Not one where anything happens, mind. Just a story where people feel. A bit like Two Sisters, in fact.
As Amy and Emma take a cheap holiday to explore their own misery in designer Lisbeth Burian’s rusting hulk of a caravan, this prodigals’ return sees the siblings attempt to recapture how it feels to be 16 again beyond their black-and-white grown-up lives. When a blast from the past shows up in the shape of maintenance man and DJ Lance, the desire to unleash the terminal adolescent within causes both women to behave as if at some kind of end-of-term school disco snog-fest.
As directed by Wils Wilson in a co-production between the Royal Lyceum and Malmö Stadtsteater in Sweden, Greig’s play is introduced by a real-life teenage chorus, who read back the audience’s own remembrances of things past gleaned from a questionnaire. This lends extra melancholy to Greig’s coming-of-middle-age saga, which nods to Chekhov, Noel Coward and Australian pop sophisticates the Go-Betweens.
The potency of cheap music is at the heart of Greig’s play, both in MJ McCarthy’s twinkly electronic score, and in the sense of transcendence and liberation Amy and Emma feel through hearing an old tune. Shauna Macdonald as Amy and Jess Hardwick as Emma tap into the overriding ennui of the piece with a series of exchanges that are laced with humour beyond their everyday denial. Erik Olsson’s Lance is similarly chasing rainbows beyond his own sense of underachievement. As the soundtrack to their lives plays out, when the trio part company, it marks a return to the reality that awaits them beyond summer’s end in an emotionally mature affair that looks like a Sunday night mini-series in waiting.
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