Soup and A Pie

Soup’s not a bad lunchtime treat, and the text sets up enough themes for a major work. It even adds an interesting reflection on God’s two thousand year silence (we had to find out for ourselves) and articulates the panic of traditional print critics in the face of the internet onslaught. It’s in the nature of modern theatre to leave a sense of “work-in-progress” and with further development the admirable actors and director could polish the dialogue- which sounds too much like a script.

It isn’t really a criticism of A Play, A Pie and A Pint to observe that this new play isn’t quite there. By keeping a high turnover, they have introduced Alan Bisset to the stage, and have given a platform for writers to experiment with short, concept packed pieces. Soup bandies around interesting ideas – the soup becomes a metaphor for the internet, which becomes a metaphor for our pluralist society and snapshots the no-holds-barred fun of family relationships. By linking with the Traverse, they are clearly challenging their audience towards more contemporary authors.

In a spirit of adventure, I caught the previous PPP menu at the Traverse. On the positive side, they do a nice haggis pie that is not available in Glasgow. On the negative, Edinburgh hospitality dictates that soft drinks only deserve a half-pint. In between was a play inconsequential: the karaoke version of the Talking Head’s song that inspired it made the previous half hour of dialogue disappear.

Heaven, to paraphrase the song, is a play where nothing ever happens. Two men are waiting in an airport in obvious symbolism. One is running away from a dull life, the other lectures him. It doesn’t set up a workable tension between the two: the old man might be eccentric and obsessed with litter, but he approves of the younger man’s plan and even his frankly shocking trousers. I’m not even happy about the idea of using heaven as a metaphor for escaping the mundane. I did it three years ago, and it solves nothing.

Beyond that, is heaven an image that has any resonance? I am a half Jesuit and half Presbyterian swamp preacher, and I’m not sure about it. At least the soup had a bit of meat in it.