@ Roundabout @ Summerhall, Edinburgh, until Sun 30 Aug 2015 @ 15:35
Three months after her mother is killed in a terrorist attack, Lucy is surprised to open her front door to her brother whom she hasn’t seen for ten years. However, when Lucy’s policeman boyfriend informs her that the partial remains of (almost definitely) her brother’s body have been found in the Scottish highlands, she is torn between logic and the powerful familial urge to be reunited with her sibling.
With no set and very few props, the tension is built almost entirely through Lucy’s decision of who to trust, or the unthinkable third option – after the trauma of her mum’s passing, she is now projecting a hallucination.
Both performers are engrossing and while Sian Reese-Williams remains as Lucy throughout, Abdul Salis plays all the male parts. This melding of characters with no costume changes, made only distinguishable through alterations in posture and body language, gives credence to Lucy’s confusion, as brother and potential fraud look exactly the same.
Multiple scenes from the past and present are cut together in rapid succession, switching between characters and eras with confusing frequency, with only a lighting change indicating an alternate scenario. At first this twists the narrative into a nonsensical stream of text, especially when the inserts are single words sporadically embedded into the flow of a conversation. But as more is revealed about Lucy, these layers of history contextualise her reluctance to succumb to reason.
Alexandra Wood’s script is a gripping, unravelling mystery that predominantly leaves shock and gore of the crime, instead focussing on how the effects of grief can manifest and make you behave.