Theatre review: Silver Superheroes, Oran Mor, Glasgow

Morna Young’s new play is powerful testament to the difficulty and joy of fully engaging with the critical times in which we live, writes Joyce McMillan
Silver SuperheroesSilver Superheroes
Silver Superheroes

Silver Superheroes, Oran Mor, Glasgow *****

The lights go up on stage, and we find ourselves in the kind of territory that often attracts a laugh of recognition from the Play, Pie And Pint audience.

A retired couple are in their living-room, doing their daily exercise routine to the sound of a broadcast voice; she is keen, he is not, and they bicker slightly as they bend and stretch.

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There is a slight complication, though, since despite their advancing years, Dave and Xenia are wearing superhero outfits in stretchy lycra, and arguing not only about their fitness class but about a past they seem unable to leave behind. For as a picture on the wall attests, they were once real superheroes, Strongman and Lady X – he with the strength of ten, she with telepathic powers.

They used to tour the world at the behest of the government, sorting out problems and saving lives; until the day when they failed one little boy trapped in a falling bus, began to lose the supreme confidence that made them useful, and were put out to grass in an east coast housing development suitable for retirees.

The trouble, though, is that Dave and Xenia have reacted very differently to this new life. Dave sits around the house in his lycra (“because it’s comfortable”), drinking bad beer; Xenia conducts slightly deranged spying missions against neighbours, dog-walkers, and stray parked cars, convinced there are still dangers everywhere. Cue the entrance of youth, in the shape of climate campaigner Hope, whose one-woman climate strike – with a home-made placard, on the beach – attracts Xenia’s hostile attentions.

This is Morna Young’s Silver Superheroes, the latest Play, Pie And Pint lunchtime drama in this year’s exhilarating autumn season; and although the play is sometimes slightly awkward in structure and tone, it is hard to overstate the timeliness of its theme, as COP26 opens in Glasgow, or the brilliance of Alex Fthenakis’s cast, led by Gerry Mulgrew and Jennifer Black as David and Xenia, and featuring an inspiring Danielle Jam as a straight-talking, Doric-speaking Hope.

Hope and Dave strike up a friendship, and Xenia finds her telepathic powers deserting her, as they both start delivering messages she would rather not hear; and it soon becomes clear that the whole play is a powerful extended metaphor for the dangers of an old age lived out in nostalgia for an old world of simple loyalties, certainties and duties, when there are such mighty new challenges to be faced, involving the fate of the planet itself.

Gerry Mulgrew is simply superb as Dave, an ageing man gradually shaking off his depression and coming to life again, as he realises there are still causes worth fighting for and new friendships to be made; and Jennifer Black is moving and eloquent as Xenia, who finds the road to that recognition much more difficult, but is guided there, in the end, by the strength of her love for Dave.

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The show has a terrific final scene – in which Xenia takes the final step into a new world – sadly slightly marred when it continues into an completely unnecessary coda, set back home at Xenia and Dave’s.

Yet it remains a powerful testament to the difficulty and joy, particularly for older people, of waking up to, and fully engaging with, the critical times in which we live; and its glorious cast deserve the warm welcome they will no doubt find when Silver Superheroes moves on to Aberdeen this week.Lemon Tree, Aberdeen, 2-6 November

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