@ Leith Dockers Club, Edinburgh, until Thu 16 Jun 2016
(part of Leith Festival)

The Wee One by Philip Rainford is a wee play with a big heart. True to its purpose, discussed here in interview, it’s a simple tale of ordinary Leith folk and the unexceptional, but deeply-felt, highs and lows of their lives.

It’s soap operatic in its set-up – a father feeling his age, a mother who can’t cut the apron strings, a son who has no reason to let her, a girlfriend he’s lucky to have. And as the play opens, with father browsing the racing pages and mum doing the ironing in a chintzily wallpapered parlour, it calls to mind Madness’s Our House video.

It’s soap operatic in structure too. Scenes are brief, with various, short-lived threads. Money, marriage, life, death and football are all ticked off in just over an hour. It’s generous with its humour, with some funny one-liners, and yet still manages to plunge the audience deep into sadness in a key scene, with The Hollies’ The Air That I Breathe employed to tear-jerking effect (one of many excellent tunes on the scene-change soundtrack).

The “Wee One” is the thirty-something boomerang kid, Danny. As a title, it’s something of a red herring. His story is relatively easily told, since he’s more than financially capable of looking after himself, and far from being the troubled and ungrateful burden on his parents one might imagine, he’s polite, considerate and seemingly well-adjusted.

The key journey is John the father’s, as becomes clear when the play reveals its roots late on. The Wee One started out as a monologue of an older gent struggling with modern online dating and the scenes built around this theme are particularly good, involving some fourth-wall breaking and clever use of the Dockers’ Club function room. John (played by Rainford himself) and Gerry (Wendy Barrett) make an endearingly bashful new couple, and once their scenes have been played out, it seems apparent the rest of the play has been built backwards from it.

This might account for the rather abrupt ending, and the occasional storyline dead-end – there’s a well-directed horse-racing scene, with an amusing commentary, that seemingly leads the audience one way, then ultimately turns out to have been purely scene-setting.

But the rough edges, like the unlikely mix of accents and demeanours among the family members, don’t detract from this sweet and entertaining play, which laudably puts ordinary lives to the fore. It is to be hoped that, like Citadel Arts, whose Leith Dockers and Doctors double bill is at the Dockers’ Club later in June, the company behind this play, Theatre Imperative, will be a fixture at Leith Festival for future years.