The Star's critic MARIA DUARTE reviews Sebastian, Four Mothers, Restless, and The Most Precious of Cargoes
Latest editorial
The lost horizons of adolescence
ANGUS REID applauds the portrait of two women in a lyrical and compassionate study of sex, shame and nostalgia
sisters
JOHN GREEN explores the argument that psychiatry needs to move away from the idea of just seeing and treating the individual
SYLVIA HIKINS applauds a polemic against “cleanfluencers” and considers radical alternatives to current inequalities of housework
RUTH AYLETT admires the blunt honesty with which a woman’s experience is recorded, but detects the unexamined privilege that underlies it
IAN SINCLAIR draws attention to the powerful role that literature plays in foreseeing the way humanity will deal with climate crisis
High quality pulp, rollicking online murders, Abnorman Britain, and high skates drama: reviews of The Get Off, Everyone In The Group Chat Dies, Pagans and First To Fall
DENNIS BROE notes what happens to content when the streaming giants incorporate AI and deregulation into their economic models
Two Sisters
Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh
THERE is a moment in David Grieg’s new play about nostalgia for the lost horizons of adolescence when the three adult characters, having partied themselves to oblivion, are gently laid to sleep like Bunraku puppets by a chorus of attentive teenagers. It is an unexpectedly moving piece of stagecraft that emphasises Grieg’s theme: that the adolescent, and the memory of adolescence, manipulates the adult.
Emma (Jess Hardwick) a smug and pregnant lawyer, has rented a caravan at the holiday park in Fife where the family once spent summers. She wants to write a novel. Her older sister (Shauna MacDonald) has been caught shagging the plumber and is taking time out from her marriage and kids. And the hippy hunk Lance (Erik Olson) who spun the discs decades before is still there as handyman and DJ.
Thus begins a gentle dance of recognition, rivalry and regret.
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