Two Sisters smells like teen spirit. Before the three leads come on in David Greig’s entertaining new play, the stage is filled with youth-theatre actors. They look like a nice bunch: a little surly perhaps, prone to whispering, plotting and occasional recklessness as they hang out on the climbing frame and beach wall of Lisbeth Burian’s sea-view set, but generally good natured.
Addressing the audience directly, they ask us to recall our own 16-year-old selves; our enthusiasms, our crushes and our summer soundtracks. Amusingly they incorporate our pre-show questionnaire responses into the script: no two performances are the same, though the memories of exuberance, vulnerability and hormones will surely be similar each night.
In a variation of the choral technique Greig used in The Events (2013) and The Suppliant Women (2016), the teenagers serve as a lurking reminder of what is at stake for the three main characters. Emma (Jess Hardwick) is a corporate lawyer who has returned to the Fife caravan park of her childhood holidays to write a novel. Being pregnant, she wants to set down her wartime romance, itself an escapist fantasy, before motherhood upturns her life.
Her big sister Amy (Shauna Macdonald) is a music researcher, temporarily homeless having left her husband and children in disgrace. Her past catches up with her in the form of Lance (Erik Olsson): maintenance man by day, DJ by night, and nearing the sell-by date on his Peter Pan-like life as a carefree dropout.
All three are at crunch points in their lives and all three find themselves seduced by the unreachable romance of their own pasts. The play has a Chekhovian title but it recalls JM Barrie in its themes of the elusiveness of youth and the impossibility of controlling time. The teenage chorus are living in a moment of heightened emotion and unknown potential; a moment the adults can never return to – not even if they buy the campsite or head off on a road trip.
Rather than allowing himself to be overwhelmed by nostalgia, Greig is funny and wry. And in Wils Wilson’s sea-breeze of a production, the central characters are immaculately performed, showing themselves as forthright, muddled and horny as their teenage shadows.
• At the Royal Lyceum, Edinburgh, until 2 March
