Purposeful pottering

The Gardener

Summerhall (Venue 26)

JJJJ

Perhaps you are resistant to sentimental plays about people getting old and losing a loved one. Perhaps you think it is too easy to substitute the common experience of grief for the emotion of a genuinely dramatic situation. But then a play as tautly written, as excellently acted and as sweetly staged as The Gardener comes along and, although modest in ambition, it defies your cynicism.

Performed to a small audience in a basement room in Summerhall, Tony Cownie’s production of a play inspired by Karel Capek’s novella The Gardener’s Year, helped into life by dramaturg Lynda ­Radley for Cumbernauld ­Theatre, turns us all into residents of an old people’s home. In nurse’s uniform, Nicola Roy is all efficient friendliness and sharp backchat as she asks after our ­ailments and settles us into the ­common room where Crawford Logan’s Frank is going to deliver a speech to the inaugural meeting of the gardening club.

In his corduroy trousers and tie, he has just the right mix of a retired teacher’s genial good manners and old-school pomposity. His talk, a blend of gardening anecdotes and tangential meanders, has the overwritten quality that typifies a man a little too in love with his own voice, drifting into purple passages wherever a horticultural metaphor comes into view.

Capek is not immune to metaphors either, and, in the passing of the seasons and the process of nurturing a garden, he finds a ­parallel with the transitions of human life.

Slowly and subtly, in between tea breaks and medicine-taking, it becomes a touching portrait of bereavement, a lonely man’s resigned, pragmatic but no less heartfelt experience of losing a wife. It feels fragile and intimate, and made all the more special for a minor coup de theatre, thanks to designer Ed Robson, before we leave.

Mark Fisher

Until 27 August. Today 2:30pm and 4:30pm.