Theatre review: New Voices, Oran Mor

FOR its final pre-panto show of the autumn season, the lunchtime Play, Pie And Pint series offers not one play but five, each lasting a bite-sized ten minutes.

The writers are all recent graduates of Glasgow University, Glasgow Caledonian, and the University of the West of Scotland; but as if to prove that new voices are not exclusive to the under-25s, the first play belongs to Stewart Ennis, a veteran of children’s and young people’s theatre all over Scotland.

His exquisite short play A Straight Line – beautifully performed by Morag Stark and Garry Collins – imagines a telling conversation between a landscape artist and a local woman he meets beside a boulder on a wild hillside, one one of his linear walks across Britain.

Victoria Bianchi’s monologue Lipstick, Powder And Paint is a short, angry, brilliant meditation on the culture of acute dissatisfaction with their own appearance that pervades the lives of young women now, and it provides a fine showcase for the talents of the third actor in the team, Jennifer Hainey.

The third play, David Cosgrove’s Dreams Of Fiji, is the clear comic frontrunner of the five, a brilliant dialogue – funny, touching, sharply-observed – between a couple living in Paisley, who have just heard that in nine minutes time, Scotland’s biggest town is to be the epicentre of a cataclysmic meteor strike that may wipe out life on earth.

Morag Stark is in fine form in Just Short Of Sparkling, a poignant monologue by Caeley Elcock about a cleaning-obsessed bereaved mother, and the fantasy world in which she lives; and the show ends with a flourish, in Emily Aitchison’s fine fragment Godfather, about a woman who – with the help of a sinister fantasy friend brilliantly played by Collins – finds that everyone who annoys her mysteriously ends up dead.

There’s no overarching theme here, and just a touch of politics, mainly of the gender kind. Yet the quality of the writing, editing and acting is truly impressive, and directors David MacLennan and Paddy Cunneen deserve congratulation, along with everyone else involved, for moulding five very different plays into such a shapely hour of theatre, sparkling with energy and potential.

Rating: ****