Theatre reviews: Dancing Shoes | Bounce

A show full of humour and pathos, Dancing Shoes makes all the right moves, writes Joyce McMillan

Dancing Shoes, Oran Mor, Glasgow ★★★★

Bounce, Perth Theatre ★★★

Three men, a shared problem, a half-circle of red plastic chairs; as the action begins, Stephen Cristopher and Graeme Smith’s new play Dancing Shoes looks like the very archetype of a Play, Pie and Pint lunchtime drama, short, unfussy, hard-hitting and intense.

Yet even though the format is familiar, as the story unfolds Dancing Shoes delivers a rare and inspired display of small-scale theatrical brilliance, packed with humour, pathos, and the kind of quick-fire street banter that has audiences shouting with laughter.

Ross Allan, Stephen Docherty and Craig Mclean in Dancing Shoes | Tommy Ga-Ken Wan

The story involves two Edinburgh friends, fortyish Craig and twentysomething Jay, who have had their run-ins with addiction, and are now attending group therapy in an effort to get their lives back on track. At the meetings, they encounter a diffident elderly man called Donny, who tells them that following the recent death of his mother, he has taken to drinking six bottles of wine a day, alone in his flat.

Donnie, though, has another life as a very private dancer, who – in his own home – dons sparkly red shoes, and grooves out to whatever music takes his fancy; and when Donny’s secret life collides with Jay’s desperation to make some cash, a story unfolds that evokes all the horrors of the TikTok age, when even our most cherished private moments can be commodified online in an instant.

Dancing Shoes is a story, in other words, that touches on one of the most urgent topical issues of our strange time, while dealing hilariously and humanely with whole range of other themes, from addiction and social isolation to class and creativity. Brian Logan directs in the sparkling, sure-footed style the story demands. And the play attracts three brilliant performances, from Craig Maclean as young Jay, born into an age of unthinking exploitation, a quietly excellent Ross Allan as Craig – doomed to watch appalled from the sidelines – and a superb and touching Stephen Docherty as Donny himself, stubbornly developing a dance style all of his own, while his sudden online career thrusts him onto the rollercoaster of this strange new 21st century form of fame.

There’s a bit of dance, too, in Dirliebane’s show Bounce, for five-ten-year-olds, currently on a short tour of schools and venues across central Scotland. Dirliebane – the name is Scots for funny-bone – is currently children’s company in residence at Perth Theatre; and Bounce is a brief, colourful show built around the idea of the Marshmallow Challenge, that famous psychological experiment in which people have a glistening, delicious marshmallow placed in front of them, and are then told that if they don’t eat it, after an unspecified time they will be given another marshmallow.

The problem with Bounce is that it dresses this powerful story up in a complicated, frolicsome framework that somehow seems aimed at a younger age-group; we’re also treated to some game-show theorising about how we deal with our emotions. Yet the show is at its strongest when the three performers are simply sitting in front of their marshmallows, struggling with temptation, and committing all sorts of competitive mischief in an effort to pass the time. This is a situation that all children of primary school age can recognise; and out of it flow all the emotions the show might want to highlight, with a clarity and vividness that is absent when we talk about feelings in the abstract.

What emerges is a slightly jumbled but impressively vivid hour, with a colourful Heath-Robinson style set by Katie Innes, some rollicking songs, and plenty of well integrated British Sign Language. And there’s certainly no faulting the commitment of joint artistic directors Fiona Ferrier and Rachel Colles, and fellow performer Irina Vartopeanu; who present the show with boundless energy, and a touch of wry irony that perfectly fits the inconvenient truths about human nature often revealed by the marshmallow test.

​Dancing Shoes is at the Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh, 1-5 April. Bounce is at the Byre Theatre, St Andrews, 11 April, and Rothes Halls, Glenrothes, 3 May.