Written by Peter Arnott

Directed by David Greig

Review by Marina Funcasta

Tickets: £16.00

Of all claims that can be made for A Group Portrait in a Summer Landscape, having a misguiding title is not one of them; set on a summer evening in a country house in Perthshire in 2014, a seasonal stillness and freshness floods every element of the stage from the first scene. Well suited, one could say, for the autumn blues quintessential of Edinburgh in October. That is, until we discover the heights and sights of George and Edie Rennie’s retirement home: overlooking a cliff, the precarity of the family home’s structural (and emotional) foundations emerge as more unstable than first thought.

Showcasing the anxieties typical of a build-up to a dinner-party reunion, Rennie, the egotistical academic patriarch, performed with a Mr Casaubon-like fierceness by Taggart-star John Michie, chosen circle emerges as quite a dysfunctional bunch. Inviting his two former pupils, Matthew Trevannion’s Charlie, and Keith Macpherson’s Frank, along with their significant others, a Czech student Jitka (performed with a much-appreciated youthful buoyancy by Nalini Chetty) and Patricia Panther’s full-hearted Kath, there is a palpable sense of past identities that Rennie just can’t seem to let go of – be they other people’s, or himself.

The irony of this only truly begins to make sense once the audience has become fully acquainted with the unspeaking, though no less present, Robbie Scott, as the late son, Will. There is barely a moment where his ghost isn’t perching on tables, peering through bookshelves, still existing in the home’s consciousness. It calls for an interesting presentation of the persistence of memory, one which David Greig seems to tug on quite explicitly in the scene breakages where we enter Will’s world. Even if it does veer off at times, particularly towards the second half, into a sci-fi setting reminiscent of something in Stranger Things’ ‘Upside Down’, the fractured atmosphere is unmissable. Thanks to Simon Wilkinson and Pippa Muro, the lighting and sound transports the audience into a technically charged, alternative reality, where things said just above earshot, tucked neatly under carpets, are finally given a space to breathe.

Above all else, however, it is a political play. Peter Arnott, having acknowledged himself that the Chekhovian themes of A Group Portrait have been mentally marinading since the 1980s, hinges on the explosive zeitgeist that pervaded the Scottish political climate in the early 2010s. The hopes and fears dragged by the idea of an independent future and the electric potential for change, perfectly captured by Patricia Panther during the dinner scene, echo in every corner of this play. At times, however, to Arnott’s message’s own downfall. To be sure, the contextual liminality merits introspection, but voicing every character’s opinion admittedly achieves a swelling effect, metamorphosing the dinner into a collision course of personalities, generations, values, and egos – all the ingredients required for a Scottish Chekhov.

Underneath the middle-class echo chamber, there is a grounded, beating heart to be discovered in Deirdre Davis’ tender, but stern, Edie and her histrionic, long-time friend, Moon, played with utmost hilarity by Bennie Young. The duo open the play in a playful little sequence redolent of innocence found in friendships like Jo and Geoff from A Taste of Honey. Moon and Edie, unlike Jo and Geoff, are keenly aware of their age, and of the passage of time; Moon to a more self-deprecating effect, Edie warranting a more tragic feel.

But in this 100-minute play, which follows the course of an evening, not much time is spared for moments of inoffensive joy. Ending on a note of solace, the tangled secrets ultimately spurted forth from an evening of eating and (much) drinking, seem impossible to separate. Much like rhetorical politics, failed promises are hard to forget, and though this play feels too economically inaccessible to warrant a state of the nation play, Arnott touches on volatility and energy which still, like Will, transpires – and perhaps it is time, as Rennie seems to discover, to surrender to it, and see where it takes us.