Theatre reviews: Just Between Ourselves | EH7

Alan Ayckbourn’s 1976 play Just Between Ourselves remains a ruthless and ultimately frightening work of art, writes Joyce McMillan

Just Between Ourselves, Perth Theatre ★★★★

EH7, Craigentinny Community Centre, Edinburgh ★★★

At what point does a play cease to be contemporary, and become a costume drama? Alan Ayckbourn’s great plays of the 1970s are now teetering on the edge of social history; and his disturbing 1976 piece Just Between Ourselves, which has just paid a brief visit to Scotland in a new production by London Classic Theatre, is no exception.

Tom Richardson as Dennis, Joseph Clowser as Neil in Just Between Ourselves

The play is set in the garage attached to the suburban house of a couple called Dennis and Vera; and it takes its place in a powerful strand of Ayckbourn plays about women driven to depression or suicide by the tension between the continuing patriarchal attitudes of the men in their lives, and their inner sense, well developed by the 1970s, that they should be men’s equals, and able to strive for some kind of self-fulfilment.

In Just Between Ourselves, the woman almost out of her mind is Vera, who is around 40, and both childless and jobless. She suffers from mental health problems – anxiety, depression – and is bullied and patronised not only by the jocular Dennis, but by his doting mother Marjorie, who lives with them. And when she and Dennis strike up a new friendship with neighbouring couple Neil and Pam, the dysfunctional quality of their marriage becomes ever more glaringly visible, while Pam’s explicit fury about what marriage and motherhood has done to her life provides a powerful contrast to Vera’s ever-deepening silence.

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The story – played out over a year – therefore offers plenty that seems both contemporary and familiar, and also much that now seems almost inexplicable, including the idea that Vera would simply give up her work on marriage, and that Dennis could easily afford for her to do so.

Beyond the portrait of a society in transition that features in all Ayckbourn’s 1970s plays, though, Just Between Ourselves offers, in the character of Dennis as reinforced by his mother, an all too recognisable study of self-satisfaction and insensitivity raised almost to an art-form. In that sense, Ayckbourn’s play remains a ruthless and ultimately frightening work of art; and if Michael Cabot’s 25th anniversary production for LCT finally lets it drift off into silence without delivering the final punch it should, it nonetheless features a memorable quintet of performances from a powerful cast, led by Tom Richardson as the appalling Dennis, Holly Smith as Vera, and Helen Phillips as Pam, harbinger of a future when women at last have more power to walk away from destructive relationships, before it is too late.

Mairi Jayne Weir as St Triduana in EH7

The changing lives of women also featured, in the latest show from Citadel Arts of Leith, a community and professional company that specialises in local history, and the memories of older citizens. EH7 is a fine and satisfying 90-minute show about that often overlooked chunk of Edinburgh that stretches east from Leith Walk without ever quite becoming Leith or Portobello; Lochend, Craigentinny and Restalrig.

With scenes created by seven local writers, Mark Kydd’s deft production therefore proceeds in eight scenes, moving from the Norman Conquest through tales of the hot air balloonist James Tytler, the doomed illusionist The Great Lafayette, the strange 16th century trial for treason of local aristocrat Sir Robert Logan, and the women workers at the local Munrospun knitwear factory.

All this is neatly threaded onto the story of Magnus Byrne’s charismatic young Rory, a contemporary student researching local history, and discussing it with his grandad, delightfully played by stage veteran James Bryce. Themes include not only the changing lot of women, but immigration, the abuse of power, and the need to understand and cherish those who don’t conform to sexual norms. And through it all is laced the founding myth of Saint Triduana; a saint beautifully played by Mairi Jayne Weir as a voice of love and compassion through the ages, and one whose well still sits in the shadow of St. Margaret’s Parish Church, Restalrig.

Runs ended

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