Theatre reviews: Men Don't Talk | Aran & Im

Although the pace of Clare Prenton’s play Men Don’t Talk sometimes drifts, it is never less than poignant and interesting, writes Joyce McMillan

Men Don’t Talk, Cumbernauld Theatre at Lanternhouse ***

Aran & Im, Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh ****

On stage, there’s a simple set showing a couple of interior walls of a shed – a fairly comfortable shed, with a table and chairs, toilets, and ample tea-making facilities; and in this simple space, three men gather, supposedly to do a little light woodwork.

Men Don't TalkMen Don't Talk
Men Don't Talk

This shed, though, is part of the men’s shed movement, dedicated to providing men with places where they can get together, and gradually break the emotional isolation in which men in our society – brought up not to show or dwell on their feelings – often find themselves living, particularly as they grow older.

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So in Clare Prenton’s gentle and sometimes beautiful new play Men Don’t Talk, produced by Genesis Theatre and supported by this autumn’s Scottish Mental Health Arts Festival, we meet recently widowed Tom – who is making a duck house for his garden pond, in memory of his beloved wife – as well as cheery ex-alcoholic army veteran Jimmy, and irritable Ken, caring for his wife who has dementia.

Over 70 minutes, these three very different men – played with tremendous sensitivity and controlled feeling by Greg Powrie, Billy Mack and Dougal Lee – slowly open up to one another, as well as having the odd laugh, and bickering entertainingly over the running of the shed, and its supplies of tea, milk and biscuits. It’s sometimes difficult to avoid the feeling that Clare Prenton’s production of her own play might have benefited from the the presence of a “outside eye” director; the pace of the show sometimes drifts into shapelessness, losing vocal power and energy as it goes.

Yet with three gifted actors on stage, Men Don’t Talk is never less than poignant and interesting. And there’s no denying how much this show means both to the Scottish Men’s Sheds Association who have helped to shape it; and to many men in the audience visibly moved by the show’s acknowledgement of men’s preference for talking not face to face, but shoulder to shoulder – even if, as in the case of Jimmy, the shared task they have set themselves only involves the completion of a jigsaw map of the British Isles, that quietly unleashes a torrent of memories of the kind every ex-serviceman carries, but rarely shares.

Manchan Magan’s Aran & Im, briefly at the Traverse over the weekend, features a man talking almost without pause for 90 minutes or so; but here, his subject is what has often been the female preserve of food and baking, along with humanity and the natural world, and the almost magical power of language itself.

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Aran & Im is Irish for bread and butter; and so Magan sets out, as he talks, to bake a sourdough loaf using his own personal yeast culture, and to churn some fresh butter, while exploring – with the help, in Edinburgh, of an audience full of Scots Gaelic speakers – the ancient words and phrases through which the Irish language describes these processes, echoing both ancient spiritual beliefs, and modern particle physics.

Magan’s point is that even the processes we use to produce basic foods depend on forces that are not visible to us, as well as on the visible world; and that languages like Irish and Gaelic – thousands of years old, and still closely linked to a traditional subsistence way of life – know more about about that vital interface between two worlds than we sometimes allow.

The result is a beautiful, thoughtful and enriching show, warmed by the delicious smell of baking bread; of which we all – in the audience, or after the show – get to taste a wonderful, buttery bite.

Men Don’t Talk is on tour until 19 November, including Aberdeen, Orkney, Banchory, Paisley, Cromarty, and Edinburgh. Aran & Im is at An Lanntair, Stornoway, 30 October.

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