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.
As one of them puts it, the property represents “milk, marrow and mortar” – not just an abstract arrangement of furniture, walls and damp patches but a place invested with memory and feeling. This is Beth (Rachael McAllister), who over the course of the hour-long play reveals herself not to be the indifferent absentee landlady she first appears, but a woman emotionally paralysed by what the house represents.
In contrast to her initial money-minded officiousness, her former partner Alf (Joseph Tweedale) seems to be making all the right moves. He has stayed in the cottage Beth abandoned and is making a fair go at running it as a self-sufficient smallholding. If his head is in the clouds, his attitude seems more attractive than her wish to sell the place.
It is only as we see more of Alf’s new partner Vee (Trudy Ward) that we perceive him to be someone trapped by the past and hell-bent on repeating it. As for Vee, she has been cornered less by history than her misinterpretation of it.
The past can also ensnare playwrights and Cowan, like Arnott, struggles to resolve the dilemma she has set herself. In Sam Hardie’s well-paced production she toys with a melodramatic finale before opting for something more benign, giving an ambiguous end to a quietly intelligent three-hander.
At Pitlochry festival theatre until 29 September
