Anna Burnside reviews a 'pleasant' production that's 'made by the strong performances'.
Sarah is not enjoying life. The neighbours play thumpy music through the night. She is up at 5.30am for the early shift as a food delivery cyclist. Her flatmate is not sympathetic.
Her flatmate is a baby grand piano.
She vents her frustration the only way she knows how: by singing. At one point it’s aria versus drum and bass. Verdi wins but it feels temporary.
When she’s not pedalling bao buns around the city, Sarah gives singing lessons to bored rich ladies. Marie’s mid-life crisis is imagining she can reinvent herself as an opera singer. She attends her lessons in sparkly boots and emotes wildly with her hands while chewing her way through Puccini’s greatest hits.
Marie, the untrained wannabe whose biggest daily challenge is cooking her husband’s dinner, is the diva while her Conservatoire-trained teacher chews down on her rage and takes it once again from the top.
It’s all a neat way to explore one of the most urgent issues facing the arts today - the way it has become impossible for working class talent to compete in a world designed for those not bankrolled by mum and dad.
Sarah’s piano, for example, was bought with compensation from her father’s industrial accident. If that feels far-fetched, writer Jen McGregor gave many of the other details the sweaty sheen of bitter experience.
But Helen is not a one-note baddie. While a lot of her woes are there as a comic counterpoint to Sarah’s live and pressing problems, she has had a different kind of hill to climb.
It’s been a less arduous one, undertaken in the finest weatherproof garments money can buy, but she too has been prevented from achieving her full potential.
McGregor avoids glib solutions and the group hug happy ending that cheapens many short issue-driven plays. Some speechifying is inevitable - time constraints mean it’s not always possible to show instead of tell. Helen offers Sarah a solution that is not perfect but is certainly better than delivering takeaways.
The show is made by the strong performances of Sarah, played by Christina Gordon’s furious soprano outbursts, and Helen Logan’s well-judged self-indulgence in the longer musical numbers. Director Tom Cooper keeps it all going at a pleasant allegretto.
It makes its points clearly and with some nuance. It’s just a shame they need to be made at all.
Who Pays the Piper is part of A Play, a Pie and a Pint’s spring season and performs at Oran Mor until April 20, 2024.
Photo by Tommy Ga-Ken Wan.
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