Festival review: The List; Summerhall (venue 26)

List-making: we’ve all done it. For the protagonist of this one-woman play by Quebec playwright Jennifer Tremblay, lists are a lifeline.

Raising three small children in a remote house, isolated from her friends in the city and drowning in the minutiae of domesticity, it becomes a way of exerting some control over her environment.

It’s not that Caroline is exactly a friend. But she, with her innocence and her much more chaotic approach to motherhood (“the laundry basket in the living room!”), is different from the other “nosey bitches” in the village, and the two women fall into an uneasy alliance. Then tragedy strikes, and all who stood by start to consider their responsibility.