DO WE LIVE IN A “broken society”? We certainly live in one obsessed by fears of social breakdown; and if the new work on this year’s Fringe is any guide, one of the main consequences of that fear is to place a huge pressure on the couple relationships that still form the core of most people’s lives.
The first three plays in the Traverse breakfast series – by six leading British playwrights – showed two couples whose suburban dream had turned to nightmare, and one young man in flight from domestic bliss; and Zinnie Harris’s The Garden also pursues the same theme, although with a quality of humanity, and pure tragedy, that none of the other plays has attempted, in the short span of 30 minutes.
Beautifully played by Pauline Knowles and Lewis Howden, The Garden captures the plight of a childless middle-aged couple, Mac and Jane, who are stranded in a residential block at some US research station where Mac is contributing to an attempt to reverse climate change.
Jane, on the other hand, is struggling to retain her sanity, alone in their high flat all day with the demons of despair; and Harris’s play offers an astonishingly moving portrait of a loving couple at the end of their tether, whose little flat becomes a kind of reverse Garden of Eden, marking the barren end of the human story.
Some playwrights, though, are still willing to cast off the chains of despair, mash up the theatrical form, and grapple with the demons of our collective culture.
Until 30 August. Today 9am.
