Carrbridge Village Hall, 17 March, and touring 2006

Fiona Knowles in Secrets & Lies & DIY

THE COMBINATION of Fiona Knowles’s one-woman realisation of writer Rona Munro’s razor-sharp scripts has established MsFits Theatre as a popular small-scale touring company across Scotland and beyond.

Fiona and her partner, Roddy, who handles the technical side of the show and driving duties, recently completed the run of their previous offering, “The Good, The Bad and The Botoxed”, with shows in the west Highlands, then premiered “Secrets & Lies & DIY” in Strathpeffer two days before this performance.

While it will doubtless bed down even more as she performs it, the actress already seemed to have a firm grip on the three disparate characters she portrays. The action is set in an Edinburgh tenement in one of the posher parts of town, and involves various complex machinations involving the three elements of the title.

Pat is currently a self-employed researcher into family trees with a husband who has signally failed to install her new kitchen over a two year period. Driven to extreme measures, she attempts a bit of DIY on the kitchen plumbing, only to flood the stern and forbidding retired teacher in the flat below, Mary Davidson.

Mary is obsessive about decoration, but her stringent standards and use of ‘the voice’ as a corrective in dealing with tradesmen has made her flat a no-go area for the local trades. She is forced to hire a young Ukrainian woman, a PhD who has been deserted by her husband and is supporting her daughter by working as a decorator.

The first half of the show establishes all three of these characters, but only as a prelude to turning the audience’s conceptions of both the characters and situation on its head. Various complex secrets and lies are revealed as the story unfolds.

Knowles pulls off the necessary transitions between the characters in expert fashion, and also deals beautifully with the change of tone that is required at times in the second half as the dominant comedy gives way to something darker and more profound in the ensuing revelations (some of the material is based on a true story that Munro uncovered in her research for another play involving refugees).

An entertaining and at times moving evening. More Highland dates are scheduled for September – see the MsFits website below for details.

© Kenny Mathieson, 2006

Link

• MsFits Theatre website