Panic Patterns

Part of Glasgay! 2010's season

A new commission from award-winning novelists Louise Welsh and Zoë Strachan. Part of Glasgay! Scotland’s annual celebration of queer culture. Read more …

Ornithologists Jacq and Fay are on a remote island in the far north of Scotland investigating sudden changes in bird migration patterns. Fay believes these changes signify forthcoming disaster. Jacq thinks the isolation is making her younger lover paranoid. But they were meant to leave the island three days ago, their boat home still hasn’t arrived and their radio has been dead for a week. When the decommissioned lighthouse across the bay shines back into life, the two women are forced to make a crucial decision.

Sometimes tender, sometimes disorientating, Panic Patterns draws on contemporary fears to create an edgy, suspenseful drama for a new decade.

The critical consensus

Like Icarus, the play is admirably ambitious and raises the spirit of same-sex relationships to a level of realism largely unseen on the Scottish stage. However, the climb to the play’s conclusion is too slow, seldom flying close enough to the sun to blaze with the power of the coming apocalypse.

(*) (*) Scott Purvis, WhatsOnStage.com, 21/10/2010

Packed into the Citz’s Circle Studio space, Alison Peebles’s production is high on tension if not always action in a piece that sets down the ground rules of a Hitchcockian thriller, only to up-end them with the resentment of a far more intimate domestic spat and back again with a cliffhanger ending that sees the pair going willingly together towards the unknown.

(*) Neil Cooper, The Herald, 22/10/2010

Alison Peebles's production just edges a three-star rating thanks to an atmospheric set and soundscape, and a pair of blistering performances from Selina Boyack and Veronica Leer. The play itself, though, has almost nothing to say.

(*) (*) Joyce McMillan, The Scotsman, 23/10/2010