Heaven @ Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh

As a half-German, I am hyper-conscious of negative associations people make with national heritage (although not every stereotype is accurate, it is true that Germans wear brown, eat cabbage and have no sense of humour). So I was excited to see this play by Eugene O'Brien in which I might see Irish culture more representatively than 'storytellers who drink and swear a lot'.

Played elegantly by Andrew Bennett and Janet Moran, the married protagonists of Heaven tell stories in which they drink and swear a lot. Over the course of her sister's wedding, their marriage fractures during the half-desperate grapple to reclaim their younger selves, which seems so characteristic of the middle-aged. Their marriage has become familiar to the point of going without saying, a non-negotiable rule of their life which can neither be avoided nor explained. The fact the two characters never share the storytelling – instead taking it in turns – draws attention not only to their mutual incompatibility, but also to the trust each has in the other to get on with it. It's a clever, if slightly bleak, evocation of how long-term marriage becomes states of being rather than active engagement.

As ever, I am obsessed with the lighting: the way it widens with warmth and isolates in cold as stories lurch between excitement, resentment, regret and quandaries. It’s like the performers conduct an orchestra of lights. Kudos also to how the fragmentary set effectively evokes pub, church, hotel, street and nightmare without ever changing. The play is funny, too, in the unchallenging but welcoming way of talented raconteurs. And yet... maybe I'm not the target demographic for Heaven, because whilst the audience laughed and cooed, I felt like I had heard this kind of story enough times before.

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Heaven, Traverse Theatre, run ended