Theatre review: Silence of Bees, Glasgow Lush

FROM the old circus arena at the Kelvin Hall to the natural soap shop in Sauchiehall Street, the Arches Behaviour Festival certainly gets around, exploring how behaviour changes in different contexts.

In truth, though, Stef Smith’s new three-handed drama doesn’t gain a great deal from its soap-filled setting, apart from the rich, heavy scent of aromatic oils. Famous for her acclaimed script for the great 2010 show Roadkill, Stef Smith sets her new play in the home of three generations of women from the same family, who have run a small business making natural honey from their own bees. Now, though, the bees are dying; and granddaughter Katie, the last inheritor of the business, has tough decisions to make.

At one level, the story of the bees themselves is dramatic enough for a short show; lush and plentiful in the early days before the war, then driven too hard through the 80’s and 90’s when more pesticides meant higher profits, and finally failing and dying, in the second decade of the 21st-century. #

Smith, though, also makes the failing bee colony stand as a metaphor for various lies and silences among the three women; and she sticks with this slightly ordinary family drama throughout the play’s short 45 minutes, even though her striking gift for stage poetry only comes alive when she focuses on the beehives, and their rich inner life.

Smith’s own production features three fine performances from Joanna Tope, Lesley Hart, and Kirsty Stuart, in memorable form as Katie, who must try to kick-start her own independent life despite so much death. The shape of the play, though, sometimes seems a little tame, given the scale of its tragic subject; which, at one level, is nothing less than the possible death of a vital part of nature itself.

Rating: ***