Theatre review: No Time Has Passed in Hippoland

IT'S A MISTAKE, although not a fatal one, for a play to mislead its potential audience about its real theme and preoccupations. This latest work from Glasgow duo Kenny Boyle and Clare Sheppard, aka Sonic Boom, presents itself as a play about motor neurone disease and euthanasia, focused on the plight of elderly Charles Mackay, trapped in his chair, 20 years a widower, and determined that his three grown-up children will help him to find an easy way out.

In fact, though, the emotional energy of the play lies elsewhere, with the story of Charlie's quest for death only forming a backdrop to a ferocious exploration of twentysomething angst, in which Charlie's three kids – single mother Jane, career girl Kate, and drugs-and-sex addict Robbie – tear improbably violent lumps out of each other for a gruelling couple of hours, before beginning to reach some kind of mutual peace.

The portrayal of the stalled relationship among these damaged, motherless people is often tediously negative: Boyle and Sheppard seem to be victims of the current vogue for portraying human beings as routinely violent, nasty and competitive, when in fact most of us are rarely anything of the sort. There are some compelling performances here, though, particularly from John Love, Karen Bartke, and Boyle and Sheppard themselves, as the four family members; and there's no denying the power of a dramatic structure that leads us through so much pain and conflict, to a conclusion that offers a faint glimmer of hope.