Theatre review: A Man Came to a Woman, Glasgow

LOVE, loss, yearning, disappointment, the faint, glimmering hope of some ordinary happiness.

A Man Came to a Woman

Tron, Glasgow

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These emotions may be the common stuff of every human life; but Russian culture and language has a special, unrestrained willingness to acknowledge and celebrate it all, as part of the currency of shared experience that makes life bearable, even in grim circumstances

Semyon Zlotnikov was a writer of Soviet-era Russia, a poet of the little private space people were able to carve for themselves, at the heart of a heartless system; and now, his rich, gentle comedy A Man Came To A Woman has its Scottish premiere in a production jointly created with the Russian-born and Glasgow-based kinetic theatre company Sharmanka, and Gary Robson’s mixed-media Fittings company, led by artists with disabilities, for performance in both Glasgow and St Petersburg.

The story is a straightforward one, of a couple in middle life trying to find some kind of future together despite the damage they’ve suffered; Viktor arrives to visit Dina, and they spend a night together.

Yet Zlotnikov is an acute observer of how emotional damage reproduces itself, from one relationship to the next; and Natalia Leonova’s production is full of a fine, passionate sense of the beauty of the story. And at the core of the show, there are two beautiful performances from Muireann Kelly and Gary Robson, as two people too old to claim physical perfection or emotional purity; but still capable of dreaming of love, and maybe even of finding it.

JOYCE McMILLAN