GETTING one's head together in the country is an (in)action that goes down the generations more than ever before. Or at least you think so from James Saunders's painful Russian-doll of a play that sees middle-aged hack, Harold, rudely awakened from his guilt-ridden idyll tending to his crippled daughter by Hannah, his daughter's best friend, who herself went AWOL after her parents' deaths.
Initial niceties dispensed with via the tongue-loosening propensities of malt whisky, the pair proceed to psychologically poke each other into some kind of submission, both opening up old scars and admitting new and uncomfortable truths as revelation piles upon interfamilial revelation. Exposed, Hannah and Harold gravitate towards the familiar, ie each other, reaching the impasse required for healing to begin. Maybe.
From its Classical Gas of a soundtrack to its tweedily-faded and perfectly-observed holiday-home interior, Saunders's play is as dustily bourgeois as they come. Most of all, its oppositional counterpoints and unfulfilled desires that span the generations, an all-too-familiar conceit of the old-fashioned menopausal academic male mind. Yet Catriona Macphie's production for the On Road Mull Theatre Company cuts straight to the play's emotional centre, wrenching sensitively-observed and mercifully-unhistrionic performances from Fletcher Mathers and Alistair McCrone.
While some of the debate may sound contrived and ill at ease with contemporary buzz words, what Saunders shows most effectively is a pair of emotional cripples in denial seeking shelter from the storm in a way that suggests they'll become unspoken co-dependants come what may. As for the night before, it must have been the drink talking.
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