Theatre reviews: Pandas | The End of Hope, The End of Desire

Published on Tuesday 19 April 2011 18:22

Rona Munro's much-anticipated Edinburgh-set play is a polished yet passionate romantic comedy that weaves together relationships spanning continents

PANDAS

TRAVERSE, EDINBURGH ****

THE END OF HOPE, THE END OF DESIRE

ORAN MOR, GLASGOW ****

THE time is the present, and in a flat somewhere in Edinburgh, a couple are arguing; in fact, they're on the point of separating for good. James is a police inspector, who drinks to blot out the horrors that he sees during his working day; Julie is a woman on the make, hungry for money and romance on a scale he can never provide.

Out on the Meadows, meanwhile, under the springtime cherry blossom, a Chinese girl called Lin Han and an Edinburgh-Chinese boy, Jie Hui, are discussing whether a year of online chit-chat and photo-sharing, culminating in Lin Han's visit to Edinburgh, has brought them to the point of marriage; she thinks it has, he seems less sure.

And outside a nearby office, Julie's secret lover Andy is waiting, not only for Julie to arrive with the lost key to his business premises, but for Jie Hui, with whom he thinks he's about to clinch a deal, and for a fate of which he has as yet no inkling, inflicted by his raging former partner, an entomologist called Dr Madeleine Murray.

This is the situation around which Rona Munro weaves her much-anticipated new play, Pandas, which premiered at the Traverse on Tuesday night, and a time when Scotland seems, if we believe the news headlines, to be doing its best to live up to its traditional image as a place of compulsive street violence and mindless bigotry, it's as delightful as it is thrilling to find one of Scotland's leading writers producing what can only be called a world-class romantic comedy, full of wit, sophistication, wisdom, optimism and desire.

This is already a key month in Munro's career, following the general release in Britain of the Jim Loach film Oranges and Sunshine, for which she wrote the script, and the opening in London of Little Eagles, her new play about Soviet space programme of the 1950s and 60s. With Pandas she finds a whole new style for her full-length drama, romantic in structure, yet savagely clever, funny and observant in tone, and the result is a hugely enjoyable, generous and sexy play about the hazards of the early 21st-century mating game, played out against a backdrop of rampant individualism, sky-high expectations, near-total sexual freedom, and unlimited online opportunities, stretching across the global village, and into the fast-changing relationship between China and the west.

Rebecca Gatward's production - with gorgeous design by Liz Cooke, lighting by Colin Grenfell, and sound by John Harris - is a fine, brisk, polished and yet passionate piece of work, that gives full value to the laugh-out-loud hilarity of Munro's comic one-liners, while never losing sight of what's really at stake here, in terms of the survival of the human capacity to love and be loved, alongside other endangered species.

As for the actors, no praise is too high for an ensemble of only six players, who carry the whole weight of our struggling urban civilisation with such lightness and energy that almost every scene is a pleasure to watch. And the play offers one of the great must-see moments of recent Scottish theatre, in Meg Fraser's fabulously erotic performance as Madeleine, the slightly dowdy academic who suddenly discovers the meaning of desire in the most improbable setting. Traditionally, Scottish writers have not been famous for their interest in sex and romance. Thanks to Munro and her fabulous generation, though, all that has changed, and now, at the peak of her powers, she writes about sex in a Scottish accent, with a passion, humour and intelligence that sometimes takes the breath away.

Nor is that the whole story about an extraordinary week of romance in Scottish theatre, for at Oran Mor in Glasgow, the gifted young writer/actor/director David Ireland has conjured up a 50-minute romcom of his own, The End Of Hope, The End Of Desire, which - despite its gloomy title - matches Munro's work every step of the way in terms of wit, tenderness, and generous insight into the way we live now.

The play is set in present-day Belfast, and as it begins, Dermot and Janet are sitting up in bed, after a one-night-stand that began in the pub and ended up at Janet's place. The complication is that Janet is wearing a mouse costume, furry mask and all, and when Dermot invites her to take it off, we are plunged instantly into the most complex, hilarious and fascinating exploration of the female struggle to escape from the tyranny of the perfect body-image we can never achieve, and of the "masks" we all wear when we embark on the dangerous business of starting new relationships.

Not content with that, though, Ireland also adds a ruthless insight into the political and cultural context within which Dermot and Janet meet - in terms of religion, class, and taste - to create a fiercely interesting and complex short play that speak volumes about the minefield of modern urban relationships, unsupported by traditional ties of kinship and community. In Ireland's own perfectly-paced production, Robbie Jack and Abigail McGibbon give two magnificent performances, as the Irish poet and the East Belfast check-out girl respectively.And the moment when Janet finally removes her mask is as poignant and beautiful a piece of theatre as any writer could hope to create; an ordinary, unglamorous woman unveiled in all her vulnerability and beauty, praying that the man standing in front of her will be able to look through the stereotypes and love her despite her imperfections, and despite all the social divisions that might have been constructed to keep them apart, and to destroy their chance of a whole new life, richer, more generous, and more fulfilled.

• Pandas is at the Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh, until 7 May. The End Of Hope, The End Of Desire is at Oran Mor, Glasgow, until 23 April.