Theatre reviews: Someone's Knockin' at the Door | Death on the Nile
Milly Sweeney’s new play is a theatrical road-movie in the best Scottish tradition, writes Joyce McMillan
Death On The Nile, Theatre Royal Glasgow ★★★
The start of the new A Play, A Pie and A Pint season is always a major event in Scotland’s theatrical spring. It’s perhaps not surprising, given the state of the world around us, that the first play to hit the tiny Oran Mor stage this year is not a blast of the new, but a gorgeous and beautifully structured journey down memory lane.
Someone’s Knockin’ At My Door is a new play by young Glasgow writer Milly Sweeney, following last year’s powerful contemporary drama Water Colour, at St Andrews and Pitlochry. It tells the tale, based on interviews with her own grandparents, of late 1960s couple Cathy and Chris, who are mum and dad to a bouncing baby boy, despite being barely out of their teens.
Chris is a massive Beatles fan, and on the verge of the band’s 1970 breakup he decides to take Cathy for a rare (and cost-free) weekend break on the Mull of Kintyre, featuring a tent and a builder’s van borrowed from a mate.
He nurses secret hopes of driving up to Paul McCartney’s house near Campbeltown and getting to meet his all-time hero; Cathy has other things on her mind, as soon becomes clear when they lose their way on the road to McCartney’s farmhouse.
It’s a simple set-up, a little theatrical road-movie in the best Scottish tradition, told through a flashback structure in which the writer’s now long-divorced grandparents meet up to record their memories of the trip, which of course often fail to match up in highly entertaining ways.
In Sally Reid’s perfectly crafted production, A Play, A Pie and A Pint veterans Maureen Carr and Jonathan Watson make a glorious job of conjuring up both the older Chris and Cathy, as well as their younger selves – Chris still full of dreams and ambitions despite early parenthood, and Cathy simply loving being a young mum, and needing a man who will offer unconditional security and support.
It’s a play, in other words, that combines a familiar formula with an astonishing richness of texture, both in describing the journey itself, and in creating two complex characters who carry with them so much of the time into which they were born.
And if the Kintyre heather remains resolutely un-alight, in this opening play of the season, the sheer quality of the work promises well for the new year at A Play, A Pie and A Pint.
Agatha Christie’s 1937 novel Death On The Nile, meanwhile, features perhaps the most famous nostalgia trip in British crime fiction; that 1930s journey up the Nile, on a luxurious cruise ship crowded with gorgeously dressed American heiresses and assorted upper class cads, that has been immortalised on screen so many times that absolutely everyone now knows who did it, and there is no mystery left.
Despite the familiarity of the tale, though, the latest touring stage version of the story – adapted by Ken Ludwig and directed by Lucy Bailey – makes a graceful and good-humoured job of recounting it for a live audience of appreciative Christie fans.
Ludwig’s adaptation offers more of the story’s early London scenes than most screen versions, and with Mic Pool’s paddle-steamer soundscape thrashing away in the background there’s plenty of scope for enjoyably melodramatic performances from Esme Hough, Nye Occomore and Libby Alexander-Cooper as the young love triangle at the centre of the story.
And of course, at the heart of it all stands the detective Hercule Poirot, evoked here by Mark Hadfield as a genial and chatty elderly genius whose bond with the audience steers the good ship whodunnit safely to port, even if the mechanism creaks a little along the way.
Someone’s Knockin’ At The Door is at the Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh, 3-7 March; the Lemon Tree, Aberdeen, 10-14 March; and Pitlochry Festival Theatre, 18-22 March. Death On The Nile is at the Festival Theatre, Edinburgh, 24-28 March.
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