If Chekhov were writing today, maybe he would be setting his plays in secondhand cars parked on suburban streets among people frozen by inertia. Certainly, there is a Chekhovian sense of unfulfilled lives in Polko, a narratively satisfying three-hander by sometime Guardian contributor Angus Harrison. What it lacks in big-picture vision it makes up for in crisply drawn character studies.
When twentysomething Emma (Rosie Dwyer) returns home to live with her parents after being made redundant from her job in business-to-business marketing, she renews her schooldays friendship with Joe (Elliot Norman) who, still living with his mum, seems happy bumbling along in his low-pressure hotel job.
For Emma, forced to return to her teenage home, “it feels like time’s stuck”. Joe sees things differently. Life is not “something that hasn’t happened yet”, he protests to counter her attempts to treat him as a lost cause in need of fixing. All the same, he is concerned at being regarded as a “shadow person” sitting friendless in the driver’s seat while everyone else gets on with the real action.
At least he is not as adrift as Peter (John Macneill), his mother’s rejected lover, a man more comfortable with facts than feelings, and all the more vulnerable for it. “I wonder if we’re on the edge of a massive revolution,” says Emma, like someone in Uncle Vanya. If she is right, it is hard to see any of these characters having the gumption to man the barricades.
As for schoolfriend Polko, who gives the play its name, he is absent for reasons the playwright keeps close to his chest in a play that is ultimately less about 21st-century stagnation than clever plotting. Directed by Emily Ling Williams for RJG Productions, it is briskly paced and engagingly acted, even if it fails to make any great statement about the returning home generation.
• At Roundabout @ Summerhall, Edinburgh, until 27 August.
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