Fresh from bagging a CATS Award for his recent work, So Young, as part of the Edinburgh Festival Fringe Theatre in 2024, Douglas Maxwell has turned his attention to expanding his solo play, originally a Play, a Pie and a Pint performance with Jonathon Watson, which is all about man's best friend: dogs.
This is the latest of Tron Artistic Director Jemima Levick's transfer of work that had its first showing at the Oran Mor into the Tron Theatre's programme. As a powerful hothouse for new writing, A Play A Pie and a Pint has provided an overwhelming number of plays, and it has always been a shame that they have not had the opportunity to have a second showing.
It is also good to see one making the transition into the main house at the Tron Theatre.
Given Maxwell’s arrival on the scene with classic texts for the emerging adolescent agenda of Decky Does a Bronco and Bad Magnet, this is further evidence of a maturing scribe. In his programme notes, Maxwell talks of seeing his first serious play, which was Mistero Buffo with Robbie Coltrane. Ironically, of course, Buffo came back to Scotland and was recently performed at the Oran Mor of all places to great acclaim as it is a classic piece of one-man theatre which manages to piece together both a well-constructed narrative of the plot and an exemplary characterisation of a storyteller who takes us through those stories with great skill.
Maxwell provides a script that tells of a dog walker farcically trying to look after his neighbours’ dogs, then opens up after finding a dead body of how he ended up being given an opportunity to deal with his grief through a fascinating gift, before ending up giving away, to a greater cause, the title of the play itself. Covering grief, hinting at the crutch of alcohol and directly dealing with COVID, it is a story very much of our times.
And it is the width and scope of the piece that delivers its greatest challenge. There is a moment when the story turns to the tragedy of a lost wife to cancer that appears midway and the tonal move from the farce and discovery to solitude and solace is stark but jarring.
Once back to dog walking, it manages to return us to territory that feels more familiar and surprisingly more illuminating as to the thoughts, feelings and emotions of our tour guide of grief, Ronnie.
Jordan Young, as Ronnie, guides us well, showing a deftness of tongue and fleetness of emotion, with nuance. It’s captivating, and his comic timing in the first half is clearly well used once we get to the third “act” that builds on that manic commotion to contrast with the sombre thought processes now at play. Now an understated performance, when he climbs to the top of his hill, now at peace, you see that transformation very clearly.
Directed by Levick with a keen eye on how these structures have to meld together and how the narrative has to take us with it, the change in tone and pace is managed, providing Young with an opportunity to hold his own onstage with security in the use of the stage and delivery of the narrative—perhaps the middle piece could have done with a different approach, perhaps less dramatic, ironically.
The set is a beautiful peculiarity insofar as it manages the outside and the inside with lighting, providing the feel of late night or early morning in a house. Pathways are on different levels around a chair, thus giving nature a wraparound feel, cuddling the inside, to offer the opportunity for revelation.
Technically, there is also projection, used to show us each of Ronnie’s dog-walking companions. It clearly is designed—and it works—for an aww from the audience, but it provides connection.
This is a piece which is about giving a human being who has suffered trauma an opportunity to understand his humanity through the giving of something that is not human. It certainly gives you a warmth and a glow and makes you remember that that's exactly how we ought to feel.