Anna Burnside reviews a production that’s ‘an impressive and painstaking bit of work, ambitious in scale and full of humanity.’
After seven dark years, the Citizens Theatre is back in business. Its first show—a co-production with the National Theatre of Scotland, co-written by two Glaswegians, about the Lockerbie disaster—sets out the stall for the next era.
Dominic Hill, the Citz’s artistic overlord, directs a story which is both Scottish and international. The cast ranges from time-served stalwarts of the Scottish stage to new graduates. While not exactly verbatim theatre, writers Frances Poet and Ricky Ross have spoken to people in Scotland and the US; only three minor characters are composites.
Poet’s inspiration was the women who cleaned and ironed clothes and books before they were returned to the families of the 259 passengers who died on Pan Am 103 in December 1988. This cross-pond empathy became the basis of a relationship between Lockerbie and the families of Syracuse University students. Thirty-five of them were killed on their way home for Christmas.
The framing device is a young woman preparing to travel to upstate New York to represent Lockerbie as part of a commemorative scholarship at Syracuse. Before she leaves, she presses her father to relive his experience as a young police officer on the ground in the aftermath of the bombing.
This thread, skilfully played by Ewan Donald (who also plays his green teenaged self) and Holly Howden Gilchrist, holds together several sprawling transatlantic storylines. And if this means that no single character gets fully developed, it also means that the experiences of a farmer, the priest, the ambulanceman, the shopkeeper and several of the women of the town add up to a rounded picture of the human response to the tragedy.
Hill’s ensemble does a tremendous job. Robert Jack stands out as the priest who steps up, and Blythe Duff does a grand job as the chief washer and ironer of clothes (and even bibles) recovered from ditches and farmyards. The former Taggart star valiantly underplays the line when, describing the satisfaction of matching belongings to their late owner, she says it makes her feel ‘like a detective’.
A live band at the back of the stage, playing Ricky Ross’s understated but warm and appropriate songs, rounds out the show.
This is an impressive and painstaking bit of work, ambitious in scale and full of humanity. It’s a shame that the heavily garlanded American musical, Come From Away, covered similar territory first. But both remind us to focus on what unites rather than divides us and that, even in the grimmest of moments, decency and kindness can overcome.
Small Acts of Love performs at the Citizens Theatre until October 4, 2025. For further details, go to the theatre’s website.
Photo by Mihaela Bodlovic.
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