Theatre review: Write Here! (Part 2), Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh

IT’S one of the paradoxes of an event like the Traverse’s Write Here! Festival that it can make rehearsed readings of brand new work into such a compelling art-form that full productions begin to seem redundant.

There’s no danger of that, though, in either of the latest two plays, from award-winning Traverse writer Morna Pearson and new kid on the block Dave Fargnoli.

Written in the lurid, post-modern Doric that is her trademark, Pearson’s new work-in-progress is a dour, hilarious and chilling study of a spectacularly dysfunctional mother-son relationship. Geoffrey is a fortysomething art teacher who has never left home, Edie is his mother, a mistress of passive aggression; and when Geoffrey takes a midlife shine to a pretty ex-pupil, his mother’s old demons are aroused, with a vengeance.

The play has a satirical script full of surreal detail, given its full value by Colin McCredie as Geoffrey and an inspired Anne Lacey as Edie. But it also features stage directions so full of acid colour and show-stopping theatricality that any red-blooded theatregoer is bound to yearn for a full staging.

Dave Fargnoli’s 80-minute Night Shift also has a touch of the surreal; but here, we’re stranded in something like a hallucinatory Holby City, as five characters argue their way through a long night in A&E.

Fargnoli writes great, incontinent rivers of words, some brilliant, others the kind of pseudo-philosophical drivel that kills drama stone dead. In a young writer, though, a tendency to write too many words is not a bad fault – look what happened to Shakespeare.

Rating: ***