Midsummer a Play with Songs: A Kinky Review

Midsummer (A Play with Songs) Features Cora Bissett, Matthew Pidgeon. Written and directed by David Greig for Edinburgh’s Traverse Theatre. La Boite, Brisbane. Season runs till April 28.

The Scots (along with the Irish) have become pretty adept at staging the oppressed, depressed and repressed thanks to a long historical association with the neighbouring Sassenachs.

There’s something about living next door to someone who keeps beating you up – and the English have been doing that to the Scots for centuries – which can makes a people curiously inventive and expressive.

The production comes from Edinburgh, the city that gave us those stars of the resurrection men in eighteen hundred and frozen to death, Burke and Hare, and Robert Louis Stevenson’s Deacon Brodie

  

This is one of the world’s great drama centres both on and off stage.

So it should come as no surprise that Edinburgh’s theatre scene is thriving and few are doing it better than the Traverse company with David’s Grieg two-hander Midsummer (A Play With Songs).

The stroke of brilliance lies in the fact that the oppression lesson has been learnt so well that the show’s main characters, Helena (Cora Bissett) and Bob (Matthew Pidgeon), don’t need the services of an outsourced villain.

They’ve developed the skills needed to beat themselves up as the two unlikely desperate drop-outs meet in a singles bar on a Friday night and disappear down the black hole of a long lost weekend, singing all the way.

Watching the show, I was reminded of a classic line from another song (not in the play), which goes along the lines of (and I paraphrase Jeff Beck’s classic ‘60s Hi Ho Silver Lining) going down a bumpy hillside when your tyres are flat.

That’s exactly what small time crim Bob and ‘wonder-if-I am-pregnant’ discarded married man’s bit on the side, Helena, do in Midsummer as they slip on one scary banana skin after another.

Nowadays my Baby Boomer definition of a lost weekend includes overlooking key items on the shopping list, forgetting where I put the car, falling over the dog, wrecking the lawn mower and following asleep after a couple of wines during Gardening Australia.

In Bob and Helena’s wacky Gen Y world a lost weekend is – thank God – much more kinky as the wee man’s Bonnie and Clyde  - now smart  Douggie – kick start their self-destructive spree by stealing the gangster’s swag.

Now, I haven’t had the benefits of a criminal education, but I have a sneaking feeling that the number one rule in Crime for Dummies is keep you’re filthy hands off Mr. Big’s loot, (if life is something you want to wake up to in the morning.)

From there our lovely, suicidal, uke strumming glamour pair goes on a downward spiral, which includes:

Hanging out with Goths.

Drinking away whatever senses they had in the first place.

Learning little or no real insight at a philosophy conference.

And (in addition to boring old one on one sex) hanging around with a bunch of weirdoes in a Japanese rope bondage club.

It’s a scenario which makes you want to go out more often and catch a play at La Boite or even …..?  Oh no maybe not. In real-life, it’s safer, and funnier, to watch others bend over backwards to be rooted unmercifully.

Finally, there are the songs from Gordon McIntyre’s ditties, including the Hangover Song, neatly reproduced in the program.

In the end we look back on Bob and Helana’s fun feast and wonder. Scotland the Brave or Scotland the Foolish? A bit of both perhaps.

And lastly not only are messes Bissett and Pidgeon a ton of fun, they’re pedigree Scots. They must be as they have both appeared in Taggart. Who can ask for more?