We already know how good a writer Owen McCafferty is. He won the Evening Standard Charles Wintour Award in 2004 and last year in Edinburgh offered up one of the plays of the Fringe with Quietly. He’s back at the Traverse again now with a hard and sparkling four-hander about the challenge of quashing boredom in long-term relationships.
The four characters he sinuously intertwines are two flatlining couples, fiftysomethings Tom (Benny Young) and Joan (Cara Kelly) and twentysomethings Tara (Amiera Darwish) and Peter (Owen Whitelaw). The moment of connection comes when Tara, seemingly self-assured, seemingly on an impulse, propositions Tom in a bar. From here on in, our narrators become a touch unreliable. Where does the truth lie? Or perhaps that should be: how much does the “truth” lie?
Are we ever, McCafferty wonders, entirely honest with each other, or even ourselves? This initial encounter sets in motion a carefully controlled domino row of events, recounted in scenes that feature various combinations of two of the characters as they struggle desperately to communicate their needs and desires.
Director Rachel O’Riordan keeps all this on a suitably tight leash and draws fine performances from her quartet of actors, especially Young and Kelly as beleaguered Tom and Joan who wonder whether it might not be easier simply to give up after 30 years of marriage rather than trudge on. Designer Gary McCann conjures up, with a minimum of fuss, a series of sleek, impersonal spaces which cleverly mirror the emptiness of the encounters therein. A faint slant of sunlight offers the tiniest glimmer of hope.
Until Aug 24 (0131 228 1404, traverse.co.uk)
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