It started as a BBC radio drama in 2016, and was reworked as a small-scale musical two years ago. Now, A History of Paper gets the mainstage treatment with two bona fide stars in the leads. The good news is that little is overblown about the production. Stars or not, Shirley Henderson and Alan Cumming only bring a greater degree of subtlety to this fragile work.
Written by the late playwright Oliver Emanuel and composer Gareth Williams, it recounts an everyday romance through the medium of paper: the postcard messages, the origami gifts, the Pizza Express receipts, the shopping lists and the confetti. A cardboard box full of such detritus is a neat way to encapsulate both the grand emotions and the ephemera that sustain a love affair. Henderson and Cumming carry it with due lightness.
Directed by Dundee Rep’s Andrew Panton, they are the tenement neighbours who go from ratty and rattled to curious and flirtatious. Where Cumming has a puppyish enthusiasm – bounding out of a morose heartbreak soundtracked by Radiohead – Henderson is variously obstinate, contrary and funny.
Hers is a fascinatingly unpredictable performance, not least when bending the rhythms of Williams’s songs: talk-singing one minute, soaring to melodic heights the next. Her duets with Cumming under Gavin Whitworth’s musical direction are things of beauty. Dressed down in jeans, cardigans and unbuttoned sleeves, the actors’ presence is airy and joyful. They pace around as if yet to decide where they will go next.
On a set by Ana Inés Jabares-Pita, half rugged Fife coast, half Ground Zero and a touch overbearing, this is also a 9/11 play. Emanuel took its theme from the paper that cascaded like snow from the twin towers after they were struck. For all the narrative neatness, the play piggybacks on that event in a way that feels manipulative. No love story, however tender or calamitous, could equal the tragedy of that day.
Otherwise, though, the emotions are true and, as Panton uses the bigger scale to his advantage, with Henderson stalking the auditorium and papery interventions from above, it makes for a short, sweet and touching chamber piece.
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At Pitlochry Festival theatre until 12 September. Then at Dundee Rep, 16–19 September.
