David Greig’s big-hitting play with music is coming to the Ustinov. Steve Wright loses a weekend in Edinburgh.

“‘Midsummer’ is unashamedly romantic. At its heart it’s a romantic comedy, and if you’ve been working on Strindberg for a few months, you need a wee bit of optimism. I wanted to write something that reflected not a saccharine romanticism, but a real, genuine one.” The speaker is David Greig – playwright, director and toast of Scotland’s theatre scene (and, incidentally, Bristol Uni drama graduate – they train ’em well there). Of late, Greig has had his adaptation of Strindberg’s ‘The Creditors’ staged at the Donmar Warehouse, with Alan Rickman on directing duties, while his version of Euripides’s ‘The Bacchae’ – starring Alan Cumming and a gospel choir – opened 2007’s Edinburgh International Festival.

Closer to home, Bath audiences got an eyeful of Greig’s talent back in 2006, when the Ustinov theatre began an extraordinarily fruitful relationship with the Traverse, Edinburgh’s dynamic and fertile new-writing theatre. That partnership began with a production of Greig’s otherworldly drama ‘Outlying Islands’, so beautiful and moving that it waltzed onto the podium in our ’06 Top Theatre awards. Since then, Scotland’s new-writing powerhouse has brought a succession of sharp, witty and provocative new Scottish plays down to the Ustinov for extended runs – highlights have included the Roman power-wrangling epic ‘Carthage Must Be Destroyed’, raucous thirtysomething debauch-comedy ‘Hoors’ and botched-kidnap farce ‘Gagarin Way’.

Greig’s latest looks in at the Ustinov next week. First produced at the Traverse in 2008, ‘Midsummer’ won four nominations at the Critics Awards for Theatre in Scotland 2009, including best play and best production. A ‘play with music’, it follows two thirtysomethings who enjoy a hedonistic lost weekend together after meeting in an Edinburgh wine bar on Midsummer’s day.

Bob’s a failing car salesman on the fringes of the city’s underworld, Helena a high-powered divorce lawyer. He’s cooling his heels before his next barely legal assignment; she’s being stood up by the married man she’s dating and looking for someone to help drown her sorrows. She’s out of his league and he’s not her type at all. They absolutely should not end up in bed together. Which, of course, is why they do – triggering a funny, eventful, desperate and increasingly poignant lost weekend of car chases, wedding bust-ups, bondage, midnight trysts and hungover, self-loathing misery. “Exhilarating: you float out laughing as if you’ve just swallowed sunshine on a spoon,” praised The Guardian.

So. A “play with songs”. A musical, you mean? Actually, no. The play features a score of songs written, very much in his day-job idiom, by Gordon McIntyre of Edinburgh indie popstrels ballboy. The actors, Cora Bissett and Matthew Pidgeon, play all instruments – as well as all parts, including the various family members and Edinburgh petty criminals who cross the duo’s path during the weekend. ‘The Sound of Music’ this ain’t. “Gordon and I had a conversation about what a musical would be like if it weren’t ‘songs from the shows’ music, but the music that we actually listened to,” Greig explains. “We both loved the idea of putting songs in a show but we thought: Why does it have to sound like a musical? And what would a lo-fi, indie musical sound like?”

He describes ‘Midsummer’ as “a total reversal of the musical”. “Where a musical has a cast of dozens, we have two. Where a musical has an orchestra, we have acoustic guitars. Musicals have people flying – and we have flying in this show, but it is literally things on pulleys that the actors have to lower down. It has all the ingredients of the musical but in miniature.”

The role of the songs, too, is distinct from that of yer usual all-singing, all-dancing affair. “It’s not like, ‘I'm going to sing the next part of the story to you and we will move the plot along by singing’,” says McIntyre. “It’s about bringing out the abstract emotion that the characters have at any given point. There are songs about being in love, falling in love, but the characters aren’t really singing them to each other.”

“Bob and Helena are in the midsummer of their lives; after this point the days are drawing in,” Greig concludes. “Midsummer is a bittersweet moment for all those reasons. It’s about that moment in your life which happens to most people in their mid-30s, where you have to ask yourself: ‘Is this it? Is this who I am?’ Bob and Helena think their youth is disappearing, but come to realise that the downward trajectory towards old age is not all it seems.”

MIDSUMMER: A PLAY WITH SONGS WAS AT THE USTINOV, BATH FROM TUE 23-SAT 27 NOV. FOR REVIEW, CLICK HERE.
 

Copyright Steve Wright 2010 

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