Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh, and touring 2006

Perfect Pie performed by Stellar Quines (photo: Douglas McBride).

YOU CAN’T help feeling that Judith Thompson has written her play the wrong way round. It’s not just that she saves the best till last, it’s that the closing revelations carry such weight that they upturn everything that’s gone before. The result is a play that makes more impression on you after the event, when you start piecing all the pieces together, than it does at the time.

For the most part, it gives the impression of being a soft-centred drama about two middle-aged friends meeting up after decades of estrangement, giving cause for much quiet contemplation about the choices that lead us to live the lives we do.

Mary Keegan’s Patsy is a stay-at-home mum, happy in her rural life of early-morning dough making and peaceful walks in the country. Her childhood chum, Francesca, formerly Marie, is a successful actor with no children, three failed marriages and a vague mission “in search of ecstasy”.

Their lengthy exchanges, necessarily reflective and obsessed with the past, lack a forward momentum and make it hard to know where the play is heading. This is despite two assured – if sometimes rushed – performances by Mary Keegan and Sarah Collier in Maureen Beattie’s confident production for Stellar Quines. Too often they seem stuck behind the farmhouse table on Jan Bee Brown’s elemental set, ploughing through lots of talk but lacking much in the way of action.

Yet something else is brewing. We sense it in the noise of an approaching train that echoes the woozy sensation of an imminent epileptic fit (after a train accident Patsy has taken on the seizures that Francesca used to have). And we guess there’s something in store for Lucy Tuck and Kirsty Wood – brilliantly playing the women’s younger selves – but it’s hard to say exactly what.

By the time we figure out that the play is not actually the nostalgic, self-pitying wallow it appears to be, but a hard-hitting tirade about bullying, gang rape and teenage suicide, the play is just about over. We learn about the traumatic teenage event too late to figure out its relationship to everything else that has gone on – certainly too late to take on board Thompson’s suggestion that Francesca was an apparition all along.

In other words, all the ingredients are here for a powerful play, but, like one of Patsy’s pies, they could do with a little more baking.

(Perfect Pie can be seen at the Village Hall Plockton, 28 March; An Lanntair, Stornoway, 30 March; Lyth Arts Centre, 1 April; Perth Theatre, 26-29 April)

© Mark Fisher, 2006