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| ID: Margo Anderson. Credit: Lila Patterson. |
Never let a spectacularly rich person invite you to a dinner party, especially if you’re as food-motivated as I am—you’re liable to get a dead body laid out on the table before you ever have a chance at a proper meal. This isn’t a spoiler; writer-director Eilidh Read’s new show opens with a funeral, rewinds to an aftermath, then drops us off at the very beginning, where a pair of young sisters are about to be sucked into the intrigues and melodramas of the manor house next door. The older sister, Caroline (Kiera Joyce), narrates what looks like a whodunit but is actually a memory piece: everyone else is trapped in one of her obsessive retellings. In a green velvet suit, making writerly observations about the “iciness” of one character, how another character “outnumbers” her, she seems older than seventeen, like she has aged out of the story that she won’t stop remembering. Kiera plays Caroline as a rueful, distant narrator who can’t help but show her hand, slipping back into the story, shouting or choking up. And when the play flashes back, she’s a child again, rolling her hands nervously in her lap.
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| ID: Kiera Joyce. Credit: Lila Patterson. |
Her sister Vivien (Margo Anderson) is an eternal child, swallowed by a dress whose waist hangs at about knee-height, always clutching at its huge bow. One day I will see Margo in a play where she is not the sacrificial lamb, too good to ever grow up, but I understand why it keeps happening to her—she’s so good at it. Everyone else is in their grownup party clothes, their past selves constantly forecasting their fateful party selves. Lila Patterson’s costumes and Emily Shoker’s hair and makeup choices are great at revealing character before a single word is spoken. And one good thing about watching rich people fuck up, they always have the nicest things on when they do it.
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| ID: the entire cast, and the table. Credit: Lila Patterson. |
Anoushka Paymaster Thatcher’s set is also consistent through the years, with the table as a centrepiece and inventively used, its surface a hiding spot, a rooftop bar, a coffin. One consequence of this and the actors never changing costume, though, is that the timeline sometimes got iffy for me. It’s the lighting, by Willa Meloth and Annalise Roberts, that more accurately conveys the Technicolor quality of memory: blue nights, red fights, and characters spotlit and frozen for Caroline to dissect.
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| ID: Libby Mullen. Credit: Lila Patterson. |
Caroline’s descriptions can lock the characters into types, like butterflies in glass jars (this is a reference to the play, only real play attenders will get it). But sometimes they break free, and the strongest storytelling choices here are sonic and visual. Early in the play, a baby’s crying is heard offstage, and Octavia (the imperious, then vulnerable Libby Mullen) simply exits the room. No remark when she comes back in about settling the baby or whatever, and I swear to God I almost started throwing roses, because I knew then I was watching a play that trusts its audience. (In the conversation that does follow, Jacob Coutts, as Octavia’s husband Michael, supplies the only real satire of the obscenely wealthy here with his offended “
Oh!”—I walk around St Andrews, I see many Michaels in the making, I try not to laugh at them, c’est la vie.) Anyway, visual storytelling: Elliott Reed plays both Octavia’s one-that-got-away and her twin brother Edison’s (Buster Van Der Geest) forbidden lover, like a symbol of true love banned by their social situations. In a moment of emotional extremity, a sobbing Caroline portrays Octavia, and Octavia stands in for her domineering father—a cool moment, a moving moment, though one which raises themes that I wish had been explored more, like Caroline’s agency as a storyteller.
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| ID: Donna-Marie French and Kiera Joyce. Credit: Lila Patterson. |
This is because the main theme set up by the formal structure of the play, the unchanging set and costumes, the dilemmas of the characters, is inevitability versus agency. A jarred butterfly will die, a jarred memory has an inevitable outcome, but jars can be opened (with extreme difficulty and hand destruction, if you’re me), and life can still fly out. Before the interval, I wrote “DOOMED YAOI + DOOMED YURI” in my notebook, pleased to be watching my queerest play of the season, even if the queer relationships seemed fated to flop. But, if this small spoiler is permissible, neither does. Because the characters make difficult choices, a happier ending looks within reach.
Tickets are still available for tonight, either online or at the door, so it should be an easy choice to get one for The Parting Glass. If you go, do dress up too—I took “formal wear” very seriously and felt a little overdressed compared to everyone else. Then, afterwards, I ran into like eight people in Market Street and chatted to them for almost two hours, and then I was going to have to walk back to Fife Park in my horrible heels but a bus appeared that said “Lest We Forget” instead of any number and the driver asked where I was going and I got a bespoke ride home in the tall empty bus. Buy one surreal and serendipitous night, get one free.
By Eliza (she/her)
