Music review: One in a Million, Oran Mor, Glasgow

IT’S full of charm, and it makes a good point in fine style, with added songs.

Oran Mor, Glasgow. Picture: Contributed

One in a Million

Oran Mor, Glasgow

Rating: ***

The problem with Cathy Forde’s latest lunchtime Play, Pie And Pint show, though, is that it’s not so much a play as a delightful 50-minute advert for the Scottish-based charity Mary’s Meals – which now provides both essential porridge breakfasts and also back-packs of life-changing small gifts, for more than a million school­children across the world’s poorest nations, from Africa to Haiti.

So in the basement of an ordinary Scottish school, janitor and boiler-fixer Gerry, an ordinary guy of 50 or so, meets Susan, a trainee teacher from Malawi. As a graduate of the Mary’s Meals project herself, Susan has been asked to use the basement for an educational exhibition about the charity; but she has just been given the chance of a big break in her other career as a night-time club DJ, and is therefore a bit distracted.

So over half an hour of more-than-a-little idealised conversation, Gerry and Susan get to know one another, become firm friends on the subject of music, and end up forming such a firm Scotland-Malawi alliance against world poverty, and in favour of life and art, that he volunteers to use his long-suppressed artistic talents to create her exhibition, while she goes off to her audition.

It’s all performed with tremendous grace, sweetness and wit by Alan McHugh and Teri Ann Bobb-Baxter, and the sounds they create when they burst into song are great. Drama, though? Not really; it’s just fun, and genial, uncritical agitprop for a very good cause.

• Traverse Theatre, ­Edinburgh, tomorrow until Saturday.