A Beginning, A Middle And An End

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JOYCE MCMILLAN on A BEGINNING, A MIDDLE AND AN END at the Tron Theatre, Glasgow, for The Scotsman 6.9.12
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3 stars ***

DOES A playwright’s age matter? The endless quest for “young” writing talent suggests it does; and there’s certainly plenty of wisdom, and a sense of the span of life, in this first play by 73-year-old former drama teacher Sylvia Dow.

In other ways, though, this graceful 70-minute play mirrors the recent work of much younger theatre artists, in its preoccupation with death, change, and the fragility of things. Directed by Selma Dimitrijevic for the London-based but Scottish-led company Greyscale, and set to tour to Edinburgh and elsewhere over the next few weeks, A Beginning, A Middle And An End is a short, impressionistic stage poem in three acts about the shared life of a couple called Ade and Evelyn, a timeless Adam and Eve. In the first scene, they meet and kiss. In the second, they are surrounded by domestic detail and burdened by grief. In the third, Ade is alone, reflecting on the strangeness of his renewed solitude.

And between scenes, the actors – Jon Foster, Emilie Patry, and Andrew Gourlay as their son – painstakingly shift all the detailed clutter of the set first into the couple’s little domestic space, and then out again; not forgetting the small forest of avocado plants that symbolises their shared determination to make something grow out of their love.

There are echoes of Vanishing Point’s Saturday Night here, and of other recent work that reflects on the freight of meaning carried by simple domestic interiors; sometimes, this seems as much an installation as a performance, slowly changing to the sound of Scott Twynholm’s gentle songs for voice and guitar. And if the final avocado song seems a little too charming for comfort, the show has another ending, a few moments earlier, that works beautifully; as Ade waits alone for the next thing, which may well be the last thing of all.

ENDS ENDS