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 gives either character sufficient complexity to escape that linearity.
More problematic for me is the painting itself. If you make an artist the centre of a play, the language and physical reality of making art need to feel authentic. Here we hear about watercolour on canvas (?!) and paint being splattered across walls and canvases in ways that simply do not ring true to the medium.
Then there is the Clyde, on whose banks much of the piece is set, described as “cyan”. Technically, of course, cyan is a colour, but to a painter it feels an oddly synthetic choice. Where are the ultramarines, ceruleans, cobalts and phthalos? Cyan feels more at home as the cartridge I replace in my printer than as the instinctive vocabulary of a painter looking at the shifting colour of the Clyde.
These may seem small points, but they accumulate. Having previously appeared in John Logan’s Red, a play in which you absolutely believe that Mark Rothko is a painter, I found the contrast particularly striking. You do not need an art lesson, but you do need to believe in the artistic life being presented. I never really did.
Natalie Fern’s set also seems unnecessarily complicated. It is an over engineered piece of stage machinery which contributed to a delay at the performance I attended and ultimately feels rather like the production itself: a lot of construction for something that might have benefited from simple truths.
There is clearly a story here that has connected powerfully with other audiences and adjudicators, and its considerable success speaks for itself. But for a play about an artist, I wanted mess, colour, contradiction and creative obsession.
Instead, everything felt rather too carefully painted between the lines.
Playing until August 30th 2026, https://www.edfringe.com/tickets/whats-on/2026WATERCO
Reviewer: Greg Holstead
Reviewed: 7th August 2026
North West End UK / Theatre Muse UK Rating:
Running time – 1hr 20mins
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