Theatre reviews: Shotgunned | Fish
Human mortality provides a rich theme for two impressive dramas, writes Joyce McMillan
Shotgunned, Cumbernauld Theatre @ Lanternhouse ★★★★
Fish, Oran Mor, Glasgow ★★★★
Coping with loss has become a huge subject for young playwrights in the UK in recent years; perhaps because bereavement, and the fact of human mortality, is one experience that still touches us all, even in an age of huge economic inequality and division.
Young Scottish playwright Matt Anderson’s 70-minute debut play Shotgunned – which picked up the Scottish Arts Club’s Bright Spark newcomer award at the 2024 Edinburgh Fringe – is a small classic of the genre; and it’s now on a UK tour, with two final Scottish performances at the Traverse Theatre next week.
Co-produced by Kangaroo Court and Serpentine Productions, and directed by Matt Anderson himself, Shotgunned tells the tale of Dylan and Roz, a young couple in their early 20s who meet, fall in love, and very quickly move in together. Roz works in Dobbie’s garden centre, Dylan has ambitions to become a serious designer and actor in the games world; and when Laura becomes pregnant, both are unexpectedly overjoyed. They decide to call their baby Olivia; and Dylan even makes moves to take on a regular nine-to-five job.
The story of how all this goes wrong is a heartbreaking and deeply touching one; and Anderson tells it through a series of short scenes that switchback almost dizzyingly from the end of Dylan and Roz’s relationship, back and forth through its key moments of decision, to its beginning, and a final scene years later. The effect of this technique is to mimic the way time collapses in extreme moments of crisis and loss; so that emotions from years ago suddenly resurface, or people long gone somehow seem nearby again, close enough to touch.
Actors Lorna Panton and Fraser Allan Hogg handle this complex narrative structure with impressive skill and feeling, and a helpless youthful honesty, in the face of life’s cruelty, that grips the heart. And the play’s message, if it needs one, is that even the people we lose when we are young can play a key role in shaping us; and that the tyranny of linear time should not deceive us into thinking that because experiences and people are long gone, they somehow no longer matter, in the big story of our lives.
Fish, by contrast – last week’s lunchtime Play, Pie And Pint drama by Perth-based writer Sean O’Neil – takes a much more flamboyantly theatrical approach to the theme of grief and loss, with an entertaining streak of pure mouthy absurdism.
Set in a sports club changing room somewhere in small-town Ireland, Fish begins as elderly coach Pat, and his long-suffering trainee Michael, gather for some last-minute preparation before Guinness Book of Records judges arrive from Dublin, to assess whether Michael can claim the world record for holding his breath under water.
The training involves Michael sticking his head in a bucket of water, and imagining himself as a fish navigating the world’s oceans, while Pat sits on a bench drinking endless cans of Guinness, and losing track of the time on his stop-watch. And they talk; Pat all the time, about this, that, and the sufferings of Ireland at the hands of the British, and Michael more intermittently, as he explains how his underwater adventures help him to cope with the memory of the death by drowning of his little sister, 21 years ago this very day.
As we soon learn when his irate daughter Grainne arrives, Pat too is supposed to be marking an anniversary today, one that he seems determined to evade.
And if Mimi Millmore struggles a little with the half-realised character of Grainne – who starts out as Mrs Sensible, and ends up as fantastically devious as her dad – there’s still a huge amount to relish in the improbable, over-written exchanges of Pat and Michael, impressively brought to life by Alan McHugh and Michael Dylan; in a play full of flaws and indulgences, that nonetheless blazes – or splashes – with promise, and potential.
Shotgunned is at the Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh, 29-30 April. Fish, run ended
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