Theatre review: You Cannot Go Forward From Where You Are Right Now, Oran Mor, Glasgow

USUALLY, plays have some kind of setting: they take place in a house, or a bar, or in a sequence of locations.

It’s a measure of the ambition of David Watson’s new lunchtime play – for Paines Plough and Play, Pie and Pint at Oran Mor this week, and the Traverse next – that it seems to be set both everywhere and nowhere; or in the air around us, full as it now is of the rasping and beeping of a thousand electronic and radio messages, which increasingly form the main substance of our lives.

As a fragmented yet poetic evocation of that world, Watson’s short play is often brilliant, a brave, complex effort to weave together at least six strands of narrative in a tiny format, as the action moves from a radio studio full of banal chat and the half-heard voices of online callers, to a pub where an estranged father tries to talk to a daughter who can barely take her eyes from her smartphone, or into a disembodied series of police calls reducing human tragedy to a scratchy drizzle of jargon.

In the end, the play slightly lets itself down, by posing a silly question about whether the machines are really running the world; whatever’s going on is surely our decision, and our fault.

James Grieve’s production draws terrific performances, though, from actors Sandy Neilson, Rebecca Elise and Rachel Ogilvy, in a play that sets its cast some ferocious formal challenges, and almost succeeds in making every one of them worthwhile.

Rating ***