Theatre reviews: The Hen Night | My Romantic History
In Dani Heron, Laura Lovemore and Anna Russell-Martin, The Hen Night has a cast to die for, writes Joyce McMillan
Sometimes, you don’t know what you’ve been missing until it suddenly reappears before your eyes. Theatre in Scotland, of late, has certainly been missing Debbie Hannan, rising star director and writer from Edinburgh, who shaped a brilliant stage version of Jenni Fagan’s The Panopticon back in 2019, is a co-director of Cardboard Citizens in London, and was once briefly – before Covid struck – joint artistic director of the Traverse.
This season, though, Hannan is back, directing the sharp, poignant and good-looking recent version of Educating Rita at Dundee Rep, and now offering their own short Play, Pie and Pint lunchtime play The Hen Night, which travels on from Oran Mor to Assembly Roxy in Edinburgh this week.
In The Hen Night, three best friends from Glasgow – wedding planner Jade, new age therapist Lilac, and tough nut Amber – are preparing the perfect hen party weekend in Edinburgh for their fourth chum Coral, who has finally found love with the apparently perfect Scott.
If the scenario seem familiar, though, the execution – in Hannan’s play and Laila Noble’s production – is little short of dazzling. Jade’s careful plans begin to come unstuck when the quartet’s Friday evening is gate-crashed by the dazzling Luna, apparently a straight-talking Belfast cousin who is a world-famous supermodel, an internet sensation, and a leading human rights lawyer; but in fact literally a goddess.
Luna warns the three pals that Coral’s wedding to Scott simply has to be stopped, and vanishes from the scene; but on Gillian Argo’s fairy-lit set – with sound and light by Ross Nunney – her appearance unleashes a superhuman tide of rhyming prophecy, sharp social observation, cutting-edge feminist rage, exhilarating bursts of hen-night song, and superbly-handled audience participation, that has the audience on the edge of their seats with sheer excitement and pleasure.
Much of this success, of course, is down to the play’s female cast to die for, an absolute three-woman aristocracy of younger Scottish actors – Dani Heron, Laura Lovemore and Anna Russell-Martin – who somehow handle five leading roles and a few supporting ones with apparent ease. The sheer female energy and hormonal firepower on stage is thrilling; and as for the lucky audience member who gets to play Amber’s legendary taxi-driver Dad, at the show I saw he seemed a very happy man, among an audience full of happily gobsmacked men, and absolutely delighted women.
At the Tron, meanwhile, playwright DC Jackson and director Johnny McKnight also take a look at modern romance, this time through the male lens of Jackson’s 2010 play My Romantic History, now re-examined for the 2020s. The play tells the tale of Tom and Amy, two thirtyish single colleagues who fall into a half-hearted relationship after a drunken office night out; and it’s structured to offer his-and-hers perspectives on the story – his first, hers later – in which each wrongly imagines that the other is keen for a more serious relationship, to strong comic effect.
In fact, though, the play’s real selling-point is its ruthless frankness about Thom’s horrifyingly commitment-phobic attitude to women and sex, which he expresses in fairly obscene terms, and which he unconvincingly attributes to the heartbreak inflicted on him by his school sweetheart, Alison; Amy’s reservations about Tom seem mild by comparison.
In McKnight’s production, there’s no faulting the two heartfelt and witty leading performances from Lewie Watson and Rebecca Wilkie, which begin to find new depth in the play’s final third, as the two face seriously grown-up decisions in a thoughtfully unromantic conclusion. And while it would be comforting to suggest that Tom’s attitudes seem a little out of date, 16 years on, in the age of the militantly miosgynistic “manosphere” that hardly seems the case; in a play now perhaps best read as a warning, disguised as a light-touch rom-com for a cynical age.
The Hen Night is at Assembly Roxy, Edinburgh, 17- 21 June. My Romantic History is now on tour across Glasgow until 26 June. For details see https://www.glasgowlife.org.uk/event/1/tron-theatre-and-glasgow-life-present-my-romantic-history
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