6 hours ago
13
Eilidh Loan marked her arrival as a playwright with Moorcroft, a tremendous male-centred comedy inspired by her father’s amateur football team. Now she has moved up a generation to write a female-centred family comedy inspired by her grandmother.
It was the older woman who stipulated that her character – the Cathy of the title – should be played by Elaine C Smith, a decision so spot on it suggests that she missed her calling as a casting director. It’s hard to imagine an actor who could better embody Loan’s vision of a newly widowed working-class woman whose grief is veering towards depression. She lands Loan’s jokes – acerbic and sharp – with battle-hardened precision.
This is a woman who craves the love of neither the audience nor anyone else on stage. She has reached a point in life where her every discomfort is voiced – sod the consequences. Her waspish tongue and world-weary sourness go down several layers before we see the vulnerable person beneath. Deflated and disillusioned, she cannot see herself making it as far as Christmas.
The setting is the aftermath of the funeral of Tommy, Cathy’s husband of 50 years, and the play begins with the kind of gallows humour characteristic of such events. Any mention of death makes one person laugh and another burst into tears.
There is Flo (Michele Gallagher), grieving for her father; Flo’s husband, Colin (Alan Orr), a Protestant intruder to this Catholic clan; and Amy (Chloe Hodgson), heavily pregnant and hoping for a less acrimonious future for her growing family. The set, designed by Kenny Miller, switches between Cathy’s front room and the charity shop where Amy works. Here, the similarly bereaved Lizzie (Sally Reid) helps push the story along – an indication that life goes on even when grief persists.
As social comedy it is snappily observed, but it is also dramatically underpowered. The only thing at stake is the family’s cordial relations in the absence of the placatory Tommy, and it hardly seems to matter whether Cathy and Flo can patch up their mother-daughter conflicts by the end of the play. New life and a Christmas resolution provide a touching ending, but even with the big laughs, it covers limited emotional ground.
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At Traverse theatre, Edinburgh, until 30 August
