While You Lie brings together the fresh writing talent of Sam Holcroft, with award-winning director Zinnie Harris, so one might have expected an exciting new play for the Traverse Festival programme. It's described as "blistering" in the Fringe programme for an audience aged 16 +. Perhaps 18 or 21+ might be more suitable for this surreal, sexually explicit drama.
We meet Ana, a young, very slim, petite Eastern European girl who is deeply insecure about her figure and looks, needing reassurance that she is not fat from boyfriend Edward. Claire Lams is perfect in the role and captures the soft accent and little girl lost look of an immigrant worker, desperate to get on the career ladder, whatever it costs.
Ana works as a poorly paid secretary to Chris, her boorish, patronising, mysogynist boss, (acted with pace and precision by Steven McNicoll) who has become bored with his marriage to domestic goddess, Helen, now heavily pregnant with their second child. He treats both women with disdain, ignoring their presence when he is not ordering them around – requiring his salmon sashimi lunch from Ana, or clean shirts and dinner from Helen.
Attention to detail has been given in creating a realistic setting, which doubles as the two couples’ homes, featuring bed, drawers full of clothes, kitchen and working shower, neatly transformed into Chris’s office. Entering the lives of these four characters is Ike, a rather shady, untrustworthy doctor, a plastic surgeon who is more concerned with a medical charity to sponsor physically deformed African children.
The plot becomes more and more bizarre, involving the criss-crossing elements of honesty, manipulation and risk within personal relationships, business investment and sexual exploitation. With a touch of humour surrounding their strange antics and affairs, nothing prepares the audience for the perverse, gratuitiously violent ending. Reading the script of this crude scene is utterly distasteful.
While the opening scenes are confident and engaging, the storyline and characterisation disintegrates into an unbelievable, overacted, farcical soap opera.
Show times
Till 29 August (different times each day), not Mons.
Ticket Prices
£17 (£12) - £15 (£11)