Edinburgh review: Daffodils (A Play With Songs) (Traverse Theatre)

Rochelle Bright’s parents met at the same spot her grandparents did: a patch of daffodils by the side of a lake in Hamilton. The question she leaves open is whether the similarities stopped there.

Driving home late at night, her 18-year-old father found Rose (Colleen Davis) blind drunk in the daffs and, ever the gent, gives her a lift home. She rocks up at the record store where he works two days later and they start dating – Rose, whole-hearted as a 16 year-old farm girl; Eric (Todd Emerson), non-committal as a red-blooded city lad. It’s only travelling the world the next year, a bikini shot snuck into his passport, that he realises she’s the one. A ring arrives in a box of yellow blooms, and the pair marry, move in and start a life together – him, working later and later; her, stuck with the kids.

Bright pairs the story with that of her grandfather, a serial womaniser, who died on the floor of one mistress’s bathroom. After a late-night phone call, Eric collects the body and, hoping to spare his mother, recreates the scene back at home: body on floor, razor in hand. Only when he gets back into bed, Rose can’t shake the smell of the other woman’s musk. The scent lingers, driving them to divorce.

Whether Eric’s version of events is true or not, Daffodils never lets slip – Bright likely doesn’t know – but that ambiguity holds its key. Beneath the bittersweet romance, this is a story about what we pass down the generations. Either Eric’s actions or Rose’s suspicions are born of what came before them, and Bright’s never been back to the daffodil bed, scared of what love might mean.

Narrated over a soundtrack of old New Zealand pop classics, history seems to hang in the air. Yet those songs also stress the currency of pop; it’s ability to catch the mood of a moment and take the pulse of an era. The teenagers fall for one another to the candyish exuberance of '60s pop. Their marriage disintegrates to the ragged yells of punk.

Nonetheless, Daffodils strains for significance, and its insights sit second to its sentiment. Despite engaging performances, the combo of jukebox musical and melancholic romance is just too stifling.

Daffodils runs at the Traverse until 28 August (except 15 and 22)

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