Pitlochry Festival Theatre - Group Portrait in a Summer Landscape.

The Guardian 31 August 2023

Peter Arnott’s elegiac new play is suspended between past and future. The past is represented by Will (Robbie Scott), a dead child whose ghost haunts the gorgeous Perthshire summer home where his father, George Rennie (John Michie), a headstrong academic, has gathered friends and family for a party. It is the run-up to the Scottish independence referendum of 2014 and change is in the air.

The future is there in the form of Charlie (Matthew Trevannion), George’s former student turned charismatic TV pundit. Taking delight in goading liberals, he is a contrarian who is delighted by the impending apocalypse. Cheerful and cavalier, he predicts an age of environmental collapse that will have no place for the values of fairness and equality he hears around the dinner table. [READ MORE]

By Mark Fisher

MARK FISHER is a freelance theatre critic and feature writer based in Edinburgh and has written about theatre in Scotland since the late-1980s. He is a theatre critic for The Guardian, a former editor of The List magazine and a frequent contributor to the Scotsman and other publications. He is the co-editor of the play anthology Made in Scotland (1995), and the author of The Edinburgh Fringe Survival Guide (2012) and How to Write About Theatre (2015) – all Bloomsbury Methuen Drama. He is also the editor of The XTC Bumper Book of Fun for Boys and Girls and What Do You Call That Noise? An XTC Discovery Book (both Mark Fisher Ltd).