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One of Scotland's foremost actresses Maureen Beattie directs Perfect Pie by Judith Thompson for Stellar Quines, the company that recently brought you the critically acclaimed productions of The Memory of Water ("An insightful and witty joy you'd be a fool to miss." Metro 2004) and Three Thousand Troubled Threads (Edinburgh International Festival 2005).
A buried memory and two teenagers'wild secret crash into the present in the course of an afternoon's reunion between the long-estranged friends. Acclaimed Canadian playwright Judith Thompson serves up a slice of life about childhood, friendship and old secrets. While Patsy (Mary Keegan, The Memory of Water) marries a prosperous farmer and stays in the town she grew up in, wild-child Francesca follows the lights of the big city as a successful actress. As they re-visit their less than carefree childhoods, the two girls now women, confront the choices they have made and a past secret.
"I will not forget you, you are carved in the palm of my hand."
Time(s) of Production: 8pm; Saturday Matinee (22nd April) 2.30pm
Location of Production: AB Paterson Auditorium
| EdinburghGuide.com - Thelma Good | What happens to strong friendships after a catastrophe? Canadian Judith Thompson's play Perfect Pie is delicately placed in the imagination of Patsy the girl who wanted to get married and have kids, and she did, but her childhood friend Marie had other dreams. When we meet Patsy she's recording a message to Marie into a tape recorder. This is no modern career woman, heck she, a farmer's wife, even bakes perfect pies like her mother. Walking into her farmhouse kitchen is Marie now an actress, stage rather than screen. She got out, even changed her name to Francesca. As they talk we see Patsy's intensely concealed controlling nature making her an emotionally flat though pleasant person - in contrast Francesca is more vibrant. That difference becomes intriguing when you meet their younger selves. As the growing girls flit in and out in flashbacks, Marie is the one who can not risk spontaneity while young Patsy takes the new comer Marie under her wing has no such inhibitions. It's a play worth sticking with despite its overly wordy story, it grips tightly in the end. Strangely for her Thompson shows a lack of confidence in dramatic suggestion and too often spells it out. Marie slowly flowers under Patsy's eager help. Lucy Tuck's Patsy is breathtakingly fragile and Kirsty Wood's Marie suggests the newcomer's troubled home life and the care of her unfurling. As the older pair Sarah Collier's Patsy and Mary Keegan's Francesca handle with some success the tricky balance of reality and illusions conjured into being. Jan Bee Brown's set is economical simple and direct lit by Jeanine Davies with Claire Bromhead's sound design providing both impressions of trains and powerful Canadian Plains' thunderstorms. Maureen Beattie's direction has impact in this Scottish production as she handles the story's spiral into bullying and the torment and frequent and sometimes final anguish it causes. Playing in Scotland, a country which has barely begun to face up to its own institionalised and endemic bullying, the production is timely. | 24/03/2006 |
| The Scotsman - Joyce McMillan * * * | ACCORDING to the US TV satirist Stephen Colbert, our culture suffers from an excess of something he calls "truthiness"; that is, a form of discourse that mimics the outward mannerisms of truthfulness, but in fact has more to do with wishful thinking, outright ideology, or conformity to the prevailing culture. And with the best will in the world, I can't help sensing a slight air of "truthiness" about the latest touring production from Scotland's female-led theatre company Stellar Quines. Perfect Pie was written half a decade ago by the Canadian playwright Judith Thompson, and its apparent aim is to explore the way women's early experiences shape, or perhaps fail to shape, their later lives. It follows the course of a short encounter - from late morning to late afternoon - between two middle-aged women who were the closest of girlhood friends, but now lead very different lives. When glamorous actress Francesca comes to visit farmer's wife Patsy in her kitchen, the two retrace the story of their childhood friendship, up to the moment in their teens when a series of traumatic events led them to put their lives on the line, and to fly off in different directions. Like many recent Stellar Quines productions, Perfect Pie has all the ingredients of a play that female audiences in particular - and many men, too - will find deeply moving and relevant, as they review the forces that shaped their lives. Maureen Beattie's careful production - featuring Sarah Collier and Mary Keegan as Francesca and Patsy - handles the text with huge respect and affection, achieving a lovely sense of narrative shape and fulfilment; and while it's so visually dull that I found my eyes straying around the auditorium for something to look at as I listened to the dialogue, it has no trouble holding the audience's attention. In the end, though, I found I didn't really believe what these characters were telling me; or at least, I found an energy and directness in the two younger versions of the characters, brilliantly played by Kirsty Wood and Lucy Tuck, that seemed to be replaced by more predictable and synthetic material in their middle-aged selves. The traumatic incident that links the two halves of their lives starts out as a well-observed piece of social realism, but veers off into pure melodrama. And, if neither of the two lead actresses cover themselves in glory, it's perhaps because they are stranded in what could have been a strongly political play about growing up intelligent and female in bigoted small-town Canada in the 1960s, which has been sidetracked into a flashback format that not only takes the edge off the drama, but also smothers the whole story in a layer of poetic psychobabble that sounds like the real thing, but takes us nowhere. | 22/03/2006 |
| The Herald - Neil Cooper * * * * | Best friends never really die. Even when one of you stays home while the other appears to have fulfilled every fantasy, the bond is still there. Such is the apparent premise of Canadian playwright Judith Thompson's tale of friends reunited, as Patsy looks back on the small-time dreams she and her wild-child best friend, Marie, raced through. Marie's brutally dysfunctional upbringing is a world apart from sleepovers and Prom nights with Patsy. All grown up and reinvented as the glamorous Francesca, she may well be just a ghost Patsy needs to lay to rest. At first glance, Thompson's play, concerning friendship, loss and one woman's belated sense of closure, looks unpromisingly middlebrow, like one of those woefully torpid cross-generational sorority movies where wisdom is passed around like overbaked but sickly-sweet home-made cookies. Sure enough, it was made into just such a big-screen outing two years after its 2000 debut at Toronto's Tarragon Theatre. On past showings, Stellar Quines are suckers for this kind of menopausal, mid-life crisis stuff. Fortunately, Maureen Beattie's beautifully acted production is exquisitely realised. Shot through with the low-key emotional languor, its slow-burning poignancy gives the experience an extra kick. Sarah Collier and Mary Keegan capture the adults' full sense of resigned disappointment, while Lucy Tuck and a fearless Kirsty Wood as their younger selves transcend the play's potential for mawkishness into heartbreak. If some of its homespun sparring comes on like me-generation platitudes, it's only because, at the play's tragic heart is a wisdom that understands that the people you leave behind are the ones who matter most. | 21/03/2006 |
| The Metro * * * * | Canadian playwright Judith Thompson's work is not to everybod's taste -metaphysical meandering, a penchant for the florid, and a certain unwieldiness in structure are some of the accusations that have been laid at her door. What she does have, however, is a distinctive voice and style, coupled with an ability to get under the skin of her characters. There are times watching Thompson's work when you could swear Tennessee Williams had come back as a woman. Perfect Pie is the story of two middle-aged women looking back over their lives and the events that shaped them, as well as the choices each made. So dirt-poor, bullied Marie (Sarah Collier) left vowing never to return, acquired a new name, Francesca, and a new life as a successful actress, while Patsy (Mary Keegan) remained to become a homebody housewife. Both profess to be happy with their lot, but tensions and dark secrets suggest otherwise. Taken as whole, the piece is a compelling look at female friendship, small-town mores and the ability or inability to fit in. Maureen Beattie's production for Stellar Quines does it proud. True, at times it veers towards the histrionic, but the glue that really holds it together is the intercut parallel narrative of the women as young girls, played to perfection by Lucy Tuck and Kirsty Wood. Recommended food for thought. | 21/03/2006 |
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