Instead of Chekhov’s gun, we have Maxwell’s whisky. The bottle of Japanese spirits shows up early in Douglas Maxwell’s comedy of social awkwardness and at some point someone is going to pull the stopper out.
What is surprising is how it happens. So Young shows every sign of heading for an implosion, a front-room breakdown like that of Abigail’s Party or something by Alan Ayckbourn. Long-time married couple Liane (Lucianne McEvoy) and Davie (Andy Clark) have turned out for an evening with their old pal Milo (Nicholas Karimi), ready to commiserate with him soon after his wife’s death, only to find he has already hooked up with someone new. They are shocked and embarrassed. It gets worse.
Maxwell scores many a laugh with the uncomfortable encounter that follows as grief, anger and bewilderment vie with etiquette. How indignant can you be when your friend has invited you over for red wine and a takeaway? How freely can you speak when his new girlfriend, Greta (Yana Harris), is sitting right in front of you?
Each responds in their own way. Liane erupts with righteous fury (McEvoy is phenomenal, delivering the play’s best speeches), Davie retreats to the security of his friend’s record collection, while Milo and Greta swoon in the throes of newfound passion.
But Greta is a different sort of catalyst. In Gareth Nicholls’s excellently acted production, rather constrained by Kenny Miller’s too-literal domestic set, she propels them not towards division but recalibration.
This is an unashamedly middle-aged play, one shaped by the loss and deprivation of the Covid era as well as a sense of life having peaked somewhere in the early 1990s. But rather than let his characters retreat to the old stories and familiar routines, Maxwell ushers in the possibility of change. Far from being a threat, Greta turns out to be someone worth uncorking the single malt for.
At the Traverse, Edinburgh, until 25 August
