Showing @ Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh until Sun 17 Apr

Theatre is often a polarised beast. While there can be some hefty debate about this position, shows tend to fall into two categories: political and apolitical. Platform 18, a new work award run by The Arches, manages to offer two plays from both categories with work from this year’s winners: Gareth Nicholls’ Pause With a Smile and Clare Duffy’s Money… The Game Show present divergent views and perceptions of our demanding, exhausted society.

Opening the night is Nicholls’ charming and quite delicate Pause With a Smile. Chatting from the cosiness of their living room, Gary McNair and Kieran Hurley are two storytellers detailing the coincidences of real life which force us to stop and reflect on the possibility that there may be something more than just chance ruling our universe. From the two brothers who both died separately in the same spot, in the same accident to the farmer’s wife who found her lost wedding ring in a potato forty years later, the narrators invite us to reflect on our lives, memories and entwined histories with a quiet fragility, reminiscent of Hugh Hughes’s gentle Story of a Rabbit. Though the play suffers from a little stagnation as the narrators offer numerous stories, they manage to break it up with audience interaction, searching for two people with the same birthday. And at the end we’re left with a certain humbleness, in that the accidental moments of our lives are worth pausing to both remember and appreciate.

Shifting to the political end of the spectrum, Duffy’s Money… The Game Show is all about the recession: how we got here and what we’re faced with. Splitting the audience into two teams, the show is heavily built on participation, as both sides must compete against each other to win the real, six thousand pound coins which actors Brian Ferguson and Pauline Lockhart play with (unfortunately you can’t make off with them as there’s a security guard at hand). They intersperse these games with scenes of banking CEOs, casino gambling and investment pitches, all the while alluding to the more complex intensities of the economic crash: CDOs, sub-prime mortgages, and fiscal derivatives. If you’re already aware of the recession’s back-story, this production can at time patronise and undercut the fundamental, ideological rationale behind the bubble, yet it does offer an introductory investigation of the wherewithal these bankers and company men thought they possessed. Much like at the end of Pause With a Smile, we’re left feeling quite sedate, but instead, it’s at what the people governing our society managed to cause out of sheer greed, insularity and recklessness.