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.

Grieg allows the sisters flights of rhetoric amid the realistic putdowns of sibling rivalry, extolling the experience of sex, of shame and of nostalgia, returning to the arena of middle-class mid-life crisis that he did a decade ago in Midsummer, but this time he dares to allow the drama to rest in the nuance of dialogue and dispense almost entirely with action.

The fact that his characters engage us so deeply is a triumph — nothing happens to them because the drama is within them, and it is this elusive inner space that we are invited to spectate.

How does he achieve this? The characters are vivid and plausible because they wrestle with creative failure. Amy’s music career never took off, Emma’s novel is “turning into porn” and Lance can DJ but he can’t create music, and amid that failure Grieg finds flashes of self-awareness and mutual compassion. And a metaphor that underlies the whole enterprise.

Lance was Amy’s teenage crush but their summer romance was cut short. She wrote to him but his reply hasn’t yet arrived. He put it in a bottle and flung it into the sea. The whole play feels like the arrival of that lost, heartfelt outpouring, and in the cunningly two-dimensional design by Lisbeth Burien, where seascapes of Fife are appended with giant postage stamps, it looks like it too.

Poetic, amusing and impeccably well acted, Two Sisters is an oasis — a welcome act of wise compassion in painful times.

Runs until March 2. Box office: 0131 248 4848, lyceum.org.uk