Water Colour – Traverse Theatre
There is something very frustrating about a play centred on a painter that never quite convinces you that its protagonist actually paints.
Written by Milly Sweeney and directed by Sally Reid, Water Colour arrives in Edinburgh with considerable acclaim and an impressive collection of awards behind it, which makes my reaction to it all the more surprising. I found the writing naive, the storytelling resolutely linear and the theatrical world surrounding its central character’s art strangely unconvincing.
The structure is very much: this happened, then this happened, then this happened. Events accumulate but rarely seem to deepen. Molly Geddes as Esme, the young artist at the centre of the story, and Ryan J Mackay as Harris give perfectly reasonable performances, but the writing rarely ...