It’s the Summer of 2021, lockdown from the pandemic is just over and it’s time for old friends to get together, to reconnect and reminisce.
Liane and Davie have been invited over by Milo, friends from school and teacher training days along with Milo’s wife Helen. They need to get psyched-up for the evening, they must be happy, hopeful, funny and optimistic – in the “positive, shapeable now”.
Helen, Milo’s wife of twenty odd years died from Covid three months ago, her body compromised by an earlier battle with cancer. Aged only 45. So young.
For Liane it feels like yesterday, and she still feels right in the middle of it, like she hasn’t even started to grieve and yet it seems Milo is already moving on as he has a new love in his life, twenty-year-old Greta whom he has met on an internet site. So young.
Liane sees this a reaction, a cliché, “a shop-worn, hand-me-down, ordered-from-the-catalogue stereotype … It’s an old man shagging a young girl. The end”. She also feels like she has no option but to be “that passive-aggressive, hurtful, snidey old bitch, torturing ... some young girl and making a scene” all because her friend died.
The question will be whether she can be different as she’s not pissed off, she’s “fucking raging”, particularly because her planned memorial for Helen is becoming sidelined.
A bigger doubt is where this evening will take them, what they will look back and muse over, the night when Greta was there for the first time. The night that Davie and Liane…
The play is powerfully performed by a terrific cast and is a sharply written both extremely witty and tender look at the nature of memory and friendship, questioning whether we can know how people feel and who gets to say who loves who. Along the way they will tackle gender and class politics, envy towards the young (with no regrets or dread) and those who can transform.
So worth seeing.
Show times: 25 July to 25 (not 12, 19) August 2024 (times vary). (Audio description 16 and 17, captioned 18, signed 24).
Tickets: £22.75 (£17.75) (other concessions available).
Suitability: Age Guide 14+ (Contains themes of death, scenes of a sexual nature, partial nudity, depictions of smoking and strong language).
Note: Part of TravFest24