Anna Burnside reviews a 'thin piece of work' buoyed by its central performance.
Bingo is king of the scheme, the guy in the tracky bottoms and the racing pigeons. Or ‘doos’.
Hanna is his social worker and, it transpires, also a bit of a pigeon person. Despite their differing backgrounds - him a superannuated ned, her a Syrian refugee professional do-gooder - they bond among the bird shit in his doocot.
The elephant in the bird house, however, is that Hanna is writing a report about an incident where Bingo left his daughter alone in his high rise flat to attend to a doo-based emergency. He lost track of time and the little girl managed to lock herself out and wandered the landing in wet pants until rescued by a neighbour.
Laurie Motherwell has a strong track record in writing interesting, complex working class men. His Traverse hit, Sean and Daro Flake It Till They Make It, was warm and funny and a more satisfying play than this one.
He has created a great character in Bingo. Conor McLeod plays him with huge attack, pivoting between gallus patter, prickly defensiveness and his signature bird-calling whoops, done to a techno soundtrack.
The rest of Roost, however, feels like an attempt to backfill his story. Hannah Yahya Hassan does her best, but her accent is clunky and her backstory sketchy and underdeveloped. Her father in Syria kept pigeons, then they moved to Glasgow, and she now calls children weans and lurks around a client’s doocot at night? It didn’t hang true.
McLeod’s performance carried Roost. His character was wasted in this otherwise melodramatic and thin piece of work.
Roost performs at Oran Mor’s A Play, a Pie and a Pint until May 18, 2024.
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Photo by Tommy Ga-Ken Wan
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