Theatre reviews: Water Colour | Goodbye Dreamland Bowlarama

The mental health struggles of the young are becoming an increasingly prevalent theme in theatre, writes Joyce McMillan

Water Colour, Pitlochry Festival Theatre ★★★★

Goodbye Dreamland Bowlarama, Oran Mor, Glasgow ★★★

It’s no news, to anyone paying attention, that young people in the 2020s have it tough, with many struggling to imagine any future at all, in a world so royally messed up by previous generations.

So it’s perhaps not surprising that the mental distress of young people is becoming an ever more present theme in theatre; and nowhere more so than in Molly Sweeney’s debut play Water Colour, winner of this year’s St Andrews Playwriting Award. Directed with skill and feeling by Sally Reid, the play premiered in Pitlochry’s studio theatre last week; and there was no mistaking the strength of the audience response to Sweeney’s story of two young people in contemporary Glasgow whose paths cross at a moment of crisis, with huge consequences for both of their lives.

Molly Geddes (Esme) and Ryan J Mackay (Harris) in Water Colour

Esme, beautifully played by Molly Geddes, is a postgraduate student at Glasgow School of Art, about to fail her masters course because she has sunk into a profound depression. Esme is gay, has felt desperately socially isolated ever since her schooldays; and when her tutor damns her belated final art work submission, she finds herself on a bridge over the Clyde, preparing to end it all.

Harris, meanwhile, is a chirpy lad of the same age, who has ambitions to become a chef, and is feeling upbeat because he has just landed a new job washing dishes in a cordon bleu restaurant. So when Harris spots Esme apparently preparing to jump, he acts decisively to stop her, reassuring her that things will and must get better.

The play’s subject, over a powerful and often moving 80 minutes, is the impact of that decisive moment on both Esme and Harris, as she begins to piece her life back together, and he – by contrast – finds that the incident unleashes inner demons that he has been suppressing for years.

The criss-cross structure of these intertwined monologues is beautifully handled by both actors, with Ryan J Mackay as Harris stepping up to play Esme’s mother and counsellor, among other characters. And both round out their own characters with memorable pathos and intensity; in a play that comes across as a vital dispatch from the front line of the mental health crisis among young people, delivered with real passion, and a memorable strand of pure poetry.

Taylor Dyson and Ewan Somers in Goodbye Dreamland Bowlarama

The central character in new Play, Pie and Pint play-with-songs Goodbye Dreamland Bowlarama, by Taylor Dyson and Calum Kelly, is also a young woman of 20 or so suffering severe mental distress; although in Charlie’s case, she hides her grief and depression – following the deaths of her much-loved parents and grandparents – behind an increasingly frenzied display of upbeat optimism, and of improbable passion for her dead-end job as an assistant at the Dreamland Bowlarama, Inverness.

It’s a bloody incident at the Bowlarama, though, that finally bursts Charlie’s delusional bubble, and sends her into a fugue state. She leaves behind her long-suffering brother Ross and his wife and baby, and flees towards Dundee, a city she has always wildly idealised as the home town of her beloved grandad, whose long lost twin brother she decides to track down.

Her quest is a crazy fever-dream of a journey, full of wild gothic incident, comedy, rejection, and another bridge incident. And in Beth Morton’s light-touch production, Ewan Somers as Ross and other hilarious and surreal characters, and Taylor Dyson herself as Charlie, make fine work of this unconvincing but vividly entertaining tale, which first shows us a young woman completely dislocated from reality, and then – in time honoured musical comedy style – suggests that she can be healed almost overnight by a crisis survived, a forgettable song, and a little soft-shoe dance.

Water Colour is at the Byre Theatre, St Andrews, 28-29 October. Goodbye Dreamland Bowlarama is at the Dumfries and Galloway Arts Festival, 27-31 May, with dates in Dumfries, Stranraer and Moffat.

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