Borderline Theatre Company, on tour October 2004

GOOD THINGS come to those who wait, and for divorcee Susan Love romance is a long time coming. We usually talk about teenagers being at a difficult age, but what could be more difficult than for a woman in her late-40s to get back into the dating game after decades of marriage?

In Liz Lochhead’s romantic comedy, our heroine has all but given up hope of finding a man, which makes it all the more delicious when she stumbles upon her perfect partner without realising it. You don’t expect to find your dream date while working in a charity shop, but that’s just where Susan meets clean-living maths teacher David Grieve – and the audience gives a collective swoon of approval.

Don’t go to this show expecting the problems of the world to be solved. Lochhead has no pretensions about her aim with Good Things: she wanted a feelgood comedy that’d put a smile on the face of anyone who’d ever been left on the shelf. And although she is rooted enough in the real world to include midlife bugbears from incontinent parents to contrary children, as well as a subplot about an obsessive stalker, she is primarily committed to fulfilling our wishes in a happily-ever-after fairy tale for the fortysomething generation.

Playing Susan is Annette Staines, a plucky, unsentimental performance that gives full breathless force to Lochhead’s explosive bursts of poetic dialogue. She and a sweet-natured Kenneth Bryans, as her camp colleague Frazer, man the counter in a Glasgow charity shop while a parade of daffy characters come and go.

The big joke in Maureen Beattie’s slick production for Borderline Theatre (her first major directorial role) is that all the secondary characters are played, thanks to swift costume changes, by two actors. Bryans also plays Susan’s brutish ex-husband, while Molly Innes runs through a glorious set of cameos including a batty old lady, a snooty shop manager, and a glamorous young socialite. It’s worth seeing the show just for her.

Compared with Perfect Days, Lochhead’s last midlife crisis comedy, Good Things is neither as funny nor as moving, but this playwright is so far ahead of the pack that even to see her on lesser form is still a delight. It’s a frothy, lightweight show that’ll send you out grinning.

Good Things plays at the Eden Court Theatre, Inverness, on Monday 11 and Tuesday 12 October 2004.

© Mark Fisher, 2004

Related Link:

Borderline Theatre website