Writer, actor and storyteller Maria MacDonnell is a familiar figure at the Scottish Storytelling Centre. Last seen here in the charming Not So Ugly Duckling two Fringes ago, this is a welcome return with her new play, LIFE.

On arrival, the audience is welcomed to a life drawing class. A lucky few are invited to take their places at easels set up on stage. The rest of the audience are given clipboards. But the model is late. Which affords the mysterious artist (Leo MacNeill) the chance to introduce the wonders of his craft. (For anyone familiar with The Line from Shakespeare’s Hamlet, he has a fun aside in the script about the graphite rating of the pencils.)

The model, MacDonnell herself, arrives eventually and the class begins. We’re all invited to make our own attempt at capturing the essence of her. No mean feat of course as the artist pompously – and MacDonnell more self-effacingly – explain. For a time, this looks to be a play about art and the extent to which art can ever do justice to life. Or maybe a play about ageing. The model is 60, she explains, and is therefore bumping abruptly into the physical and the social ramifications of getting older and as a woman, becoming – she suggests – less visible. But then there’s another twist altogether and maybe it’s still a play about art and ageing but it also turns into a musing about the composite value of a life.

The production is nicely staged – the on-stage artists in the life drawing class is a lovely touch. (As an on-stage ‘artist’, this reviewer can attest that there’s something nicely meditative about the act of attempting to life draw while listening to the story unfold.) The script is interspersed with gentle music by Georgina MacDonell Finlayson. MacNeill’s artist is a perfect epitome of the patriarchy that the model rails against, strutting, declaiming, offering his extensive thoughts on the way the art world works to his art class attendees. MacDonnell delivers much of her commentary with a wry detachment that makes her final reconciliation with the artist all the more affecting. But ultimately this feels like an interesting idea that more could be teased from to make a more satisfying piece of theatre.

If you’re trying to catch the play, or the opportunity to sit still with a blank piece of paper and a variety of drawing instruments for an hour, it’s playing alternate days and hops to a later time in a week.

LIFE is at Scottish Storytelling Centre – Netherbow Theatre until Mon 26 Aug 2024 (except 19, 21, 22, 25) at 17:00