Theatre in Review: A Slow Air (59E59)

Meet Athol and Morna, the two halves of the fractured family portrait that constitutes David Harrower's A Slow Air. They're siblings, close in (middle) age; she lives in Edinburgh and he in Glasgow, although they may as well live on opposite sides of the globe, for all they have to do with each other. He is married, but childless, and, thanks to a career as a contractor installing kitchens and baths, is solidly middle-class. Virtually everything in Morna's life is marginal, including her job (cleaning houses) and her personal life, which consists mostly of occupying a bar stool until closing time, when she goes home (or doesn't) with the sometime bed partner she calls Sir Lancelot. She once channeled her furious energy into the Scottish National Party, but all that is gone now, along with the man who wanted to marry her and the man who fathered her son. (They're not the same person.)

That son, Joshua, is the only remaining link between Athol and Morna, who haven't spoken to each other in years. When the play begins, Joshua turns up, after many years, on Athol's doorstep, intending to stay for an indefinite period of time, and offering no explanation. He's on the run. Just before this, Morna, sitting on a bus, spies Joshua in the street and waylays him, all but demanding that he make a plan to celebrate his upcoming 21st birthday. The way she talks to him, it's no wonder that he chooses to disappear for a bit.

The rest of A Slow Air is a series of snapshots of Athol, Morna, and Joshua (as seen through the eyes of his mother and uncle). Athol and Joshua reconnect, but it is a somewhat troubled reunion. It 's just after the failed bombing of the Glasgow airport, and Joshua, angrily fascinated by it all, breaks into the now-empty home of one of the perpetrators, a doctor who lived near Athol. Later, Joshua allows Athol's dog to befoul the home of another Muslim neighbor, setting off an ugly confrontation. Meanwhile, Morna, without any idea where Joshua is, moves ahead with her party plans. Having saved the life of Randolph, a client, when he has a heart attack, she asks Randolph's wife, Rosie, for the use of one of her homes. When Rosie, exuding self-righteousness, turns her down, Morna, in a rage, takes possession of the house anyway. Much of the suspense in A Slow Air comes from our growing realization that this plan is destined to go very badly indeed.

In most cases, the use of alternating monologues signals the lazy man's approach to playwriting, but in A Slow Air each narrative line is sufficiently compelling that you hang on each word, trying to figure out where and how the narratives will intersect. It allows Harrower to constantly add shadings and complications to our perceptions of Athol and Morna. He may be the more stable of the two, but there are many details -- an eruption of anger at a potential client, the admission of an extramarital affair -- that reveal many levels of discontent. Morna may have a world-class talent for self-destruction, but she knows her faults intimately, and her love for Joshua, despite its inappropriate moments, is very, very real -- more than even she realizes. "Rosie smiles at me," she says. "'Your face lights up when you talk about him,' she says. 'What?' I say, 'Like I've been electrocuted?'"

The he said/she said format also allows us to discover what they don't know about each other. Athol, for example, is ignorant of a crucial confrontation between Morna and their parents when she became pregnant with Joshua. Morna is unaware of steps Athol and their parents took to secure Joshua's future. And Athol's marital cheating isn't nearly as much of a secret as he thinks. Interestingly, Athol's narrative is shot through with unease over a changing, multicultural Scotland and the possibilities of terrorism -- ideas that never occur to the thoroughly self-absorbed Morna, who is only interested in survival and settling scores. (In one of her more scathing passages, she recalls her stultifying youth: "I see my mum and dad sittin' on their sofa suite behind their double-glazin'. I cannae hear a sound. Nothin' comes out, nothin' goes in. Ssh, Morna. Quiet. Be quiet.")

A play like this won't work at all without a pair of accomplished actors, and Harrower, who also directed, has found just the couple for the job. (The production comes from Glasgow's Tron Theatre and is part of 59E59's Scotland Weeks series.) Lewis Howden's Athol is, at first, an easygoing everyman, the kind of suburbanite who quietly goes about his business, never making a fuss. However, the actor gradually fills in the character with many shadings of ambivalence, dissatisfaction, and wonder, revealing him to be far more complex than he first appears. Susan Vidler's Morna comes out swinging, pacing the stage, chin cocked in the battle position, a pair of dead eyes daring you to ask for trouble. But underneath that tough exterior, there's much more going on, and Vidler has many subtle ways of making this clear. We don't need to see them connect on stage to understand the bond that links them from miles away.

A Slow Air is, necessarily, an intimate show, and it doesn't ask for an elaborate design. The tour-ready package here, designed by Jessica Brettle, does make use of two very different kinds of flooring to suggest Athol and Morna's worlds; she has also costumed the actors most appropriately. Dave Shea's lighting crossfades gracefully between the characters and Daniel Padden's sound design employs a number of scene-setting effects, including the sound of planes overhead.

It all comes together in an Edinburgh pub with an impromptu birthday celebration that is packed with surprises, and it ends with the deeply moving image of the two siblings, on opposite sides of a train station, still separated but, perhaps, touched by a brief moment of grace. In 82 minutes, Harrower spins a tale that has the density of a good novel; it's a remarkably absorbing piece of work.--David Barbour