Theatre reviews: Studio 3 | The Brown Doll

It’s been a challenging half-decade for Scottish theatre, but the re-staging of three successful shows at the Tron shows how much has been achieved regardless, writes Joyce McMillan

Studio 3, Tron Theatre, Glasgow ★★★★

The Brown Doll, Oran Mor, Glasgow ★★★

At first glance, it seems like a strange idea, to take three of the finest shows from artistic director Jemima Levick’s years at A Play, A Pie and A Pint, and to re-create them as a studio series in the tiny Changing House at Levick’s new theatre, the Tron.

Alright Sunshine by Isla Cowan PIC: Eoin Carey

As the buzz of excitement around the Tron this week shows, through, this kind of high-powered revisiting of successful shows which often have very short first runs is exactly what Scotland’s theatre scene needs at the moment, to remind both artists and audiences of just how much has been achieved over the last difficult half-decade, and how richly enjoyable and rewarding that work can be.

Featuring just three brilliantly cast actors – Dani Heron, Jo Freer, and Kevin Lennon – the trilogy ends with Fruitcake, a three-handed romantic comedy by Frances Poet that was first seen at Oran Mor in 2022, under the title The Prognostications Of Mikey Noyce; and that combines real charm with a serious streak of lockdown thoughtfulness about the frightening condition of our world.

All three actors also appear in the second play, Meghan Tyler’s explosively funny and shocking Fleg, directed now, as in 2023, by Dominic Hill of the Citizens’ Theatre. Set in loyalist Belfast in the week of the Queen’s death, Fleg is a wild and brilliant absurdist comedy about a loyalist called Bobby, who loves the Union flag outside his house with what can only be called an unusual passion.

In this play, Lennon and Freer struggle slightly to match the mighty performances given by Harry Ward and Beth Marshall as the original Bobby, and his Benidorm-loving wife Caroline. Heron, though, is splendid in the peachy double part of Tierna, the council worker who tries to lower Bobby’s flag for the royal mourning, and the gorgeous pole-dancing embodiment of the “fleg” itself.

Mehren Yar in The Brown Doll

It’s in the first play of the trilogy, though, that Studio 3 hits five-star heights, with Dani Heron’s heartbreaking and brilliant performance of Isla Cowan’s outstanding Edinburgh monologue Alright Sunshine. Acclaimed when Hannah Jarrett Scott first performed it in 2022, Alright Sunshine features Nicky, a young policewoman patrolling the Meadows on a hot summer day, who gradually reveals the huge personal cost of maintaining her strong and “unemotional” professional persona.

In Debbie Hannan’s pitch-perfect new production, Heron gives what is what is possibly the performance of her life as Nicky; in a show that is all the more intense for appearing in a tiny 60-seat space, but that somehow also seems far too big for it, not least in its importance for the increasingly misogynistic world in which we now live.

At Oran Mor, meanwhile, the work of platforming a new play every week continues with a first-ever pay by West End actress Cilla Silvia, inspired by her own adoption story. Told in a pensive and slightly untheatrical narrative style, but with immense feeling, The Brown Doll follows 20-something Silvia, who was adopted as a baby by a Swedish family, as she returns to Sri Lanka in search of her birth mother.

She is haunted, on her journey, by three mother figures. There is her anxious mum Anna, at home in Sweden. There is Umaima, a woman who helps her in Sri Lanka, but who turns out to know more than she should about the business of farming out Sri Lankan babies to wealthy white families; and there is the elusive figure of her birth mother, Rumisa.

In a sense, the story as told in this version seems more like a preliminary outline for a longer and richer treatment, perhaps on screen, than a standalone play. There’s no doubt, through, about the importance of the questions it raises; as our cash-crazed world becomes ever more adept at commodifying human life itself.

Studio 3 is at the Tron Theatre, Glasgow until 17 May, with Fruitcake also on tour to Glasgow community venues from 22-31 May. The Brown Doll, run completed.

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