Theatre review: Laundry and Bourbon, Edinburgh Whitespace Gallery

NOT many theatre companies open a brand new show over the Easter weekend; but in a gallery off Gayfield Square, shoestring group A Company Called Andy have decided to fill the gap by staging three performances of this brief 60-minute play by American writer James McLure.

LAUNDRY AND BOURBON

Whitespace Gallery, Edinburgh

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NOT many theatre companies open a brand new show over the Easter weekend; but in a gallery off Gayfield Square, shoestring group A Company Called Andy have decided to fill the gap by staging three performances of this brief 60-minute play by American writer James McLure.

McLure, who died last year, is not well known in Britain; but if this sharp 1970s piece for three small-town Texas wives is any guide, he’s a writer whose well-made domestic drama contains serious hidden depths.

As the play begins, Elizabeth – a woman of 30 or so – is standing smoking on her back porch, gazing at the horizon through the baking Texas heat. Her friend Hattie drives up, a harassed and pretty mother of three who has known Elizabeth all her life; she soon finds out that Elizabeth is facing another crisis in her marriage to Roy, a troubled Vietnam veteran. After a while, their chatting and bourbon-drinking is interrupted when upwardly-mobile Amy Lee appears, eager to tell Elizabeth she has seen Roy in town with another woman.

And that’s all there is; except for the fact that all the characters are so well drawn and placed that they tell us a huge amount about the fragile family happiness of American life in the late 20th century, and about the increasing, half-hidden cost of her foreign wars.

In David McFarlane’s no-frills production, which runs until tomorrow, Susanna Mulvihill and Kate Gwynn give two thoughtful and often very funny performances as Elizabeth and Hattie; and the whole show offers a small, vivid early-evening shot of theatre, to carry you through the holiday weekend.

joyce mcmillan