Platform, Glasgow, 28 September 2012, and touring

THE set looks like a tidal wave of chairs. It’s as if these everyday objects have been thrust violently into the air, tumbling over each other as they bisect the stage. It is an image of quiet domesticity turned into chaos.

NO DOUBT designer Claire Halleran was tuning in to a similar sense of discordance in Linda McLean’s bold, unusual and mesmerising play. Staged by Edinburgh’s Magnetic North, Sex and God focuses on four women who are making the transition from the familiar to the unknown. In their undemonstrative way, they are pioneers, variously taking the step from dependence to freedom, from home to work, from family to university, from country to city. Like Halleran’s chairs, they have been thrown into the dark, uncertain what will hit them or where they will land. They are in flux.

McLean makes this feeling of nightmarish change more intense by devising an unconventional structure. The four women are from different times in the 20th century and do not speak directly to each other. Instead, they relate their experiences in a poetic collage of voices that resonate across the generations in such a way as to suggest they have a shared female engagement with the world.

Lesley Hart in Sex and God (photo Colin Hattersley)

Thus, Ashley Smith plays a kitchen maid moving to the big city; Lesley Hart plays a woman struggling to make a living between having children; Louise Ludgate plays an abused wife making a break to better herself; and Natalie Wallace plays a student discovering the heady possibilities of university life. Under the carefully modulated direction of Nicholas Bone, they give exquisite performances, at once independent of each other and perfectly tuned in. With such elliptical and dreamy writing, it can be hard to hold on to the four narrative strands, but the actors are always focused and poised, pulling us into their stories.

Although unquestionably artful, the production somehow manages not to be esoteric or inaccessible. Rather, it has the appeal of a rare artefact – fragile, enthralling and just a little enigmatic.

© Francis McLachlan, 2012

Links

• Magnetic North