Lorna Irvine reviews a production that's 'pretty much as perfect as it gets'.
There is a creeping malevolence in Martin McCormick’s play for A Play, a Pie and a Pint, directed by Finn Den Hertog with a slow-burning brilliance. It’s rare to see a piece that takes on the tropes of cinema (unease, taboos and tragedy) and applies them to a play with such expertise. Coming on a little like the Coen brothers and compounded by the kitschy lounge sounds by Lewis Den Hertog, this tale of kidnapping was inspired by a real-life event that happened to McCormick’s friend.
When Ma (Anne Lacey) and son Bald (Keith Fleming) kidnap a gauche teenager, Paul (Christian Ortega), accusing him of stealing Bald’s bike, it becomes clear there was never a bike in the first place…possibly.
The pair are psychopaths…maybe—ostensibly too close for comfort and bound together indefinitely. Lacey, a murderous matriarch with fringed jacket and eyes bulging, has tied her hulking adult son to her apron strings and pulled tighter than a corset. Into their home, and domestic games, Paul is thrown—but is he as blameless as he initially comes across?
Fleming and Lacey are of course superb, Fleming’s capricious man-child the perfect foil for steely, controlling Lacey, but Ortega shows real promise as Paul, who develops if not a Stockholm syndrome then an understanding with Bald, which gives an unexpected poignancy.
Hilarious, full of pithy one-liners and simmering with menace, you may not hear the invitation of an Arctic roll in such a welcoming way again. In fact, the whole is like riding a bike: you can never forget it. Pretty much as perfect as it gets.
Squash performs at Oran Mor until October 18 before transferring to the Traverse from October 21-25.
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