In a mountain pass, high in the Pyrenees, two climbers discover a middle-aged man unconscious in the snow. He wears a coat with an American label and a suit by a tailor in Geneva. In one hand, he clasps a briefcase full of euros; in the other, the scallop-shell medallion traditionally carried by pilgrims to Santiago de Compostela. He has no papers, no passport, and no memory of who he is or how he got there. And he speaks English. Read more …
Anna Edwards, from the British Consulate in Marseilles, is duly despatched to see if she can establish his identity. But as she and the man sit on a nearby hotel terrace trying to reconstruct his past and confirm his nationality, an unexpected attraction begins to develop between them.
The sudden arrival of a visitor threatens to undermine their conclusions - and the burgeoning romance. For the newcomer, Vivienne, claims that she is the man’s wife. That he has a job, a family and a home in Edinburgh. And that she has been pursuing him across Europe for several months . .
There is laughter and forgetting aplenty in John Durnin's urbane revival of Greig's 2005 play, which, in the courtyard of Frances Collier's design, is rendered as a piece of broodingly ice-cool European art-house that delves deep into the psycho-sexual drives of a suburban mid-life crisis.
Basienka Blake and Dougal Lee act out these final scenes with a sense of inevitability that’s both bleak and shimmering; while Mark Elstob’s baffling hotel proprietor circles around them, changing nationality by the hour, as if to demonstrate that identity is never simple, and always – even for those who can remember their past – an endlessly moveable feast.
It is the backdrop for a quartet of well-judged performances, with all four actors navigating the mix of humour, tenderness and heartbreak in the script with remarkable deftness.
Pitlochry Festival Theatre, Pitlochry from Thursday August 20, 2015, until Wednesday October 14, 2015. More info: www.pitlochry.org.uk
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