Written by Enda Walsh

Directed by Lucy Ireland and Jim Manganello

Review by Dominic Corr

The Tron Theatre

A contemporary fairytale is a powerful, intoxicating kind of tale; and for audience in Glasgow, the story from Enda Walsh is a highly anticipated one: high in a tower block, a woman’s number called into silence while an anonymous listener on the other side of a wall collecing her stories, and what begins as a strange, intimate conversation between strangers unfurls into a dark fable about surveillance, connection and the power of imagination, presented by Glasgow’s Shotput.

Arlington at The Tron Theatre is a striking exercise in theatrical choreography where movement, light and image do significant amounts of the narrative labour. The production carves a compact dystopia out of minimal means, assembling a bank of monitors, a raised playing area and three fiercely committed performers into a machine that watches and is watched. What the evening lacks in conventional plot it more than makes up for in physical intelligence: gestures accumulate meaning, stillness becomes threat, and the architecture of the stage functions as a moral landscape.

On stage, sequences are constructed with the clarity of contemporary dance and the understatement of a well-drilled ensemble. Repetitions are never merely decorative; small, habitual actions: the tug of a sleeve, a slow turn of the head, the exact way a body takes weight are treated as textual units. These micro-movements are edged by larger choreographic set pieces that redistribute focus around the room, inviting the audience to map relationships by alignment and proximity rather than exposition. Such choices pay off because the performers sustain a vocabulary that is at once economical and capacious, able to carry shifts in power and intimacy without relying on explanation.

Technically, the production is exemplary. Anna Yate’s Sparse scenic elements are amplified by a precise lighting scheme that alternates clinical interrogation with sudden, saturated intrusions of colour, each change calibrated to feel like memory or emotion breaking through procedure. While Rob Willoughby’s video functions not as an illustration but as a dramatisation, multiplying viewpoints so characters are continually doubled and refracted. Sound design anchors the work with a low, insistent hum and carefully timed silences that convert the auditorium into an instrument; even when words are scarce or elliptical, the room itself supplies a narrative pulse.

Performances are anchored by physical clarity and tonal shifts do much of the play’s storytelling work, with Aisha Goodman’s Isla conveying a weary, imaginative centre and Alex Austin’s Young Man oscillating between officiousness and fragile tenderness while negotiating the monitors and microphones that shape their world; Jack Anderson provides a searing extended movement sequence that functions as both narrative hinge and emotional release, and the production is further textured by the recorded voices that punctuate the action (Ann Louise Ross, Andy Clark, Pauline Goldsmith and Benny Young).

There are frequent flashes of humour and tenderness that humanise the piece and make the dystopia feel lived-in rather than schematic. Moments of ritualised absurdity, dressing and undressing as a civilised game, a domestic routine rendered unfamiliar, provide relief and reveal character through action. These human beats allow the audience entry points; they also expose how much the production depends on physical storytelling. Where the movement communicates fully, the atmosphere is transfixing.

Writing is, surprisingly, the weakest element. The script is ambitious in its obliqueness and its willingness to let image and motion share authorship, but it too often retreats into intriguing fragments without ever furnishing the emotional currency that would make those fragments pay off. Key scenes end in a kind of rhetorical suspension that feels intentional but ultimately undercuts catharsis. The text’s poetic gestures sit well beside the visual design, yet at moments they demand more narrative anchoring than the play is prepared to give.

Taken as a whole, Arlington is an impressive demonstration of theatre as embodied intelligence. Staging and design are inventive and rigorous, the ensemble work is finely calibrated, and the production repeatedly finds new ways to make the physical elements speak. The script’s daring does not always land, which prevents the piece from achieving full emotional resolution, but the theatrical craft on show rescues the evening and often elevates it into something memorable; a production which insists that movement can carry ideas that language only sketches.

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