On the face of it, there is little overlap between the two new plays that complete the summer season in Pitlochry. Where Peter Arnott’s Group Portrait in a Summer Landscape is a large-cast contemplation of the political movements of the last century, Isla Cowan’s To the Bone is an intimate study of a three-way relationship tangled up in a rural cottage.
It is interesting to see how each playwright treats the highland Perthshire setting as a place for self-discovery. But the two plays are connected by more than location. Arnott and Cowan are both concerned with the debilitating hold the past can exert on the present. Where the characters in Group Portrait have become frozen in the thinking of the last century, the three characters in To the Bone have become ensnared by their history with their rural retreat.
