Midsummer (a play with songs) review: A romantic comedy where the characters spend more time talking to us than each other

David Greig's play follows two lovers on a dizzying weekend in Edinburgh. Photo: Keith Dixon 

Project Arts Centre, Dublin
★ ★

In Midsummer (a play with songs) the most compelling lovers withhold their affections. This, the logic of romantic comedies, is astutely spelt out by Helena, a Scottish woman having a dizzying weekend in Edinburgh with a man she’s recently met. “It’s the way the couple have to resist their feelings,” she says. 

At first, David Greig’s play seems to fall in line. It has its conventionally unlikely bedfellows. Helena (Roseanna Purcell), a high-heeled lawyer made cynical by years of divorce settlements, meets Bob (Aidan Crowe), a Dostoyevsky reading criminal selling stolen cars. They jump into bed, spark and fizzle, and are pushed apart. Will they uncover their true feelings? It has been pretty much this way since Much Ado About Nothing. 

If disagreement is important in romantic comedies, Greig makes a point of having these characters actually agreeing on things. They become resolved to abandon previous dreams, and admit that life in the present is challenging. 

Some may fight that harmony subversive, leaving behind the will-they-or-won’t-they tension and giving more time to the characters’ individual struggles. Helena, first seen upfront and direct, grows to resemble someone rejected and lonely. In one surreal episode Bob gets the shaft (eh, from his own) for his meaningless flings. 

Sadly, that means these characters spend more time talking to us than each other. There may be a way to show closeness between them, but at a pace as breakneck and crammed as Disco Pigs, it isn’t easy. 

From these complications, you can understand why Eoin Kilkenny’s production, directed by Eoghan Carrick, has done its best to present the play as a bright and reassuring comedy. Musical instruments are nicely concealed within Alyson Cummins’s set, a shelter from the Edinburgh rain, glowing like an oil painting under Eoin Winning’s lighting. 

Split between narration and dialogue, the actors never quite reach the underplayed territory of intimate romance. Instead they bring the broad gestures, particularly Purcell who transforms cunningly into an easily angered criminal and an overbearingly sweet weather woman.

The candy wrapper gloss doesn’t quite work, especially when Greig seems to be trying to suspend romantic gestures to show the grim and crushed lives of his characters. You can see the appeal to play Gordon McIntyre’s songs melancholically, as if channelling Glen Hansard and Markéta Irglová, but they might deserve the carrying-on wink of Johnny Cash and June Carter.


Runs until Jun 8th.