Cathy – Traverse Theatre
Tommy never appears, we don't see him alive, in flashback or even in a photograph. Yet by the end of Eilidh Loan's beautifully observed new play, I felt I knew him.
That is quite some trick.
Tommy is dead before the story begins, leaving Cathy to negotiate that peculiar new country called widowhood. Elaine C. Smith, making a heroic return to the Traverse stage after 26 years, gives us a woman whose stoicism is matched only by her capacity to find humour in the darkness.
And Cathy is surprisingly, wonderfully funny. Not polite theatrical chuckling, but genuine laugh out loud funny. Loan understands something fundamental about grief and perhaps about Scottish families: sometimes you laugh because the alternative is crying. During this performance, plenty of people did both.
T...