Theatre Review – Heaven
* * * *
It's Heaven with Sean Scanlan and Barbara Rafferty. Photograph by Lesley Black.
A Play, A Pie and A Pint at The Traverse
Brief in length but resonating long after the play has finished, Simon Stephens’ Heaven is the perfect opener for the Traverse’s five-week season of lunchtime theatre, A Play, A Pie and A Pint.
It is so brief, and so intensely played by Robert Jack and Sean Scanlan, that it seems hardly any time has passed before it is over. But that just leaves plenty of time to mull the whole thing over while consuming your pie in the bar afterwards before heading back to work.
What is lodged in the head is not the fragment it might first have seemed to be, either. There are too many interpretations of who the two characters might really be, whose encounter in Edinburgh airport makes up the totality of the play.
Jack, seen most recently on TV as Jacko in Gary: Tank Commander, plays the clean-cut Sean, who casually drops the lid of his coffee on the way to board his plane to Turin. Scanlan, of River City and Two Thousand Acres of Sky, is Kyle, a hectoring elderly man who reproaches him for doing so.
If their conversation starts off with rubbish and recycling, it is soon jutting off into tangents. Kyle extolls the virtues of eating raw courgettes, going so far as to tell Sean which aisle he should get them from in Real Foods on Broughton Street – and how much they should cost.
Read the rest of this review in the Edinburgh Evening News here.
