Theatre reviews: Ivor | Alas Poor Yorick

Climate change, the ethics of activism and empty nest syndrome make for a potent mix in Ivor, writes Joyce McMillan

Ivor, Oran Mor, Glasgow ★★★★

Alas Poor Yorick, The Studio, Edinburgh ★★★

It takes some nerve to write a play that tackles the climate crisis, the ethics of activism, and the extremes of empty nest syndrome, in just 50 minutes. That’s what Jennifer Adam has achieved, though, in her tense new Play, Pie, Pint drama Ivor, a three-handed satire poised between wild comedy and global catastrophe, with a dash of strong family soap opera thrown in.

Alas Poor Yorick

As the play opens, Sarah is in her kitchen, celebrating the arrival of a 21st birthday gift for her daughter Scarlet. She has named the gift Ivor; though it’s not a puppy, but a twenty-foot iceberg recently calved on the coast of Greenland, near where Scarlet’s late father was born.

Scarlet arrives, and is a tad underwhelmed by her gift, which is clearly impossible to transport. And it soon becomes apparent that the installation of Ivor is part of a plan on Sarah’s part to keep her recently-graduated daughter at home – caring for the iceberg, and harvesting its valuable meltwater – rather than heading off to London to take part in major actions against climate change alongside her partner Judyth, who soon joins the conversation.

What follows is an intense and sometimes almost unhinged exchange about Scarlet and Judyth’s plans, Judyth’s special reasons for becoming an impassioned climate activist, and the lengths to which Sarah is prepared to go to get Judyth out of her daughter’s life; Jennifer Adam’s themes are the importance of family, and the fierce strength of the mother-daughter bond, which always – she hints – outweighs mere political theory. And in Catriona MacLeod’s no-holds barred production, the whole furious argument, is handled with skill and passion by Alice Glass as Scarlet, a memorable Betty Valencia as Judyth, and Laura Harvey as Sarah; the crazy mother whose madness has a certain method to it, and can even become unexpectedly, and deeply, moving.

The same mix of wild comedy, political tragedy and intense family drama famously feature in the grave-digging scene from Shakespeare’s Hamlet; and in their latest show Alas Poor Yorick, the much loved UK performance company Ridiculusmus reimagine the scene as if – as they put it – “the Two Ronnies were cast as the gravediggers, in a version by Samuel Beckett”.

So as the show begins, two gravediggers of few words enter, and half-heartedly prepare for work. One – the show’s co-writer and co-director Jon Haynes – plays the junior gravedigger; the other, John Gorick, plays the senior gravedigger and the junior gravedigger’s donkey, an aged, wheezing, quasi-human figure who enjoys a cigarette.

Fragments of modern chat are delicately intercut with familiar words from Shakespeare’s scene, where the gravediggers offer their own perspective on the death of Ophelia, and her burial in sanctified ground despite the likelihood that she took her own life.

What the show’s pre-publicity did not say, though, was that at the moment when the royal characters approach the grave, with Jon Haynes morphing into Hamlet, the two actors would be joined by five performers from Edinburgh’s brilliant Lung Ha’s company, clad in dressing-up-box Shakespearean costumes, and evoking the presence of Horatio, Laertes, Claudius, a castle priest, and the late Ophelia herself.

Whether this brief and pageant-like appearance represents the best possible use of the Lung Ha team’s formidable talents, at this stage of their development, is worth debating.

Yet it’s always a joy to hear actors wrapping their voices around Shakespeare’s magnificent words in a context that brings whole new levels of insight. And if that is true of Jon Haynes and John Gorick, in Alas Poor Yorick, then it also proved true of the Lung Ha’s actors, with Gavin Yule and Nicola Tuxworth bringing real passion to the roles of Laertes and Claudius; and Emma McCaffrey, as the priest, rolling out Shakespeare’s words on Ophelia’s death with a relish and authority that, for a brief moment, almost took the breath away.

Ivor at Oran Mor, Glasgow until tomorrow, and at the Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh, 15-19 April. Alas Poor Yorick, run completed.