Theatre review: Fly Me to the Moon

Published on Wednesday 1 September 2010 19:59

THEATRE FLY ME TO THE MOON **** ORAN MOR, GLASGOW

THESE DAYS, Marie Jones of Belfast is a world-famous playwright, recognised everywhere for smash-hit plays like Women On The Verge Of HRT. Despite her success, though, she has never lost her sharp eye for the detail of the lives of working women; and in this new play for Paines Plough and the Play, Pie and Pint season – which launched its autumn programme this week – she focuses on one of the UK's most neglected groups of workers.

In Fly Me To The Moon – which will travel on to the Traverse later this season – Jones's two characters, Frances and Loretta, are care workers, dropping in on infirm old people in East Belfast to take them to the toilet, clean them up, feed them their meals-on-wheels, and carry out small errands for them. One day, though – while Loretta is out, and Francis is listening to her iPod – an 86-year-old client called Davie drops dead in his bathroom. In no time, these two hard-working, humorous and desperately underpaid women are riding a roller-coaster of temptation and subterfuge, as it dawns on them that Davie's pension for the week, and the 500 he has just won at the bookie's, could all be theirs.

It can't be said that Jones yet seems like a mistress of the 50-minute short-play form. As a piece of social observation, the play is tense and poignant enough; it hardly needs an ever-more Byzantine crime-scene CSI thread to sustain it over such a short period. But the play features a witty flashback structure, as Francis and Loretta confess their story to some future court of inquiry; and James Grieve's production features two high-powered comic performances from Katie Tumelty and Abigail McGibbon, as two women driven to the verge of crime by a society that has no idea how to value them.