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A Slow Air

Tricycle Theatre, Inner London
From: Tuesday, 8th May 2012
To: Saturday, 2 June 2012

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Synopsis

Morna works as a cleaner for well-off families in Edinburgh. She spends her time drinking mostly, attempting affairs and trying to work out the mind of her 20-year-old son with whom she shares her Dalry flat. Athol, her elder brother by 2 years, moved to the West of Scotland years ago with his wife Evelyn. The owner of a floor tiling company, with two grown up children, he's proud of his hard-won achievements. Like any brother and sister they have fond and not-so fond memories of their upbringing, differing views on their parents and definite opinions about each other. But Morna and Athol haven't spoken a word to each other in fourteen years... When Morna's son Joshua travels west to make contact with Athol he sets off, for all of them, a remarkable and life-changing series of events.

Our Review:

11 May 2012

Written and directed by David Harrower (whose previous work includes the acclaimed Knives in Hens and Blackbird) A Slow Air explores the troublesome past of an estranged brother and sister who have not spoken for 14 years.

Where Harrower's previous work makes space for the unknown and the unsaid, this sparse two-hander allows the characters of Athol Lewis Howden and Morna Susan Vidler to pick over the details of their fractured relationship in a pair of beautifully interwoven monologues.

At the start of the play the siblings are both geographically and emotionally distanced from one another. Athol, a self-made man in the tiling trade, lives in Glasgow with his wife where he enjoys the small successes of a neat, peaceable life. Morna, on the other hand, has an unsettled existence in Edinburgh: cleaning the houses of the rich, drinking with vigour and trying to round-off her 21 years as a mother by throwing a party-to-remember...

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