Theatre review: Saint One, Glasgow
Saint One - Oran Mor, Glasgow
* * *
When it comes to the play though, it’s difficult to know where to start disentangling its vivid but busy layers of bright post-modern comedy. The scene is a fish and chip shop in Stonehaven, famous for inventing the deep-fried Mars Bar. The problem is it has been swept away by a tsunami, and is now floating in thick mist on the North Sea, while its two passengers – an irritable ex-journalist called Walter (Ewan Donald), and the seriously dazed Geraldine, played with great skill and humour by Elaine C. Smith – struggle to sustain conversation, due to Geraldine’s rapid alternations between a doting conviction Walter’s really her late daughter Anne, and a belief she is Billy Connolly, the favourite entertainer of the family she lost.
The play’s structural problem is that this opening phase of mutual non-comprehension is too long, with poor Geraldine emoting through a veil of brown sauce splattered all over her face, so audience members without a detailed knowledge of Billy Connolly are at a serious disadvantage. Things improve, though, about 30 minutes in, when a sprightly Helen Mackay emerges from a cupboard as dynamic teenage chip-shop assistant Kelly. A kind of junior goddess of Stonehaven wit and wisdom, she has a life to get back to, in the town whose first five letters say “St One”; and she’s just about equal to the task of persuading Walter and Geraldine they also have reasons to pick up a giant fish-slice, and start paddling for home.