The Guardian 7 August 2023

Playwright Laurie Motherwell is sensitive about stereotypes. In a comedy about two working-class Glasgow lads with entrepreneurial ambitions, he repeatedly resists the temptation to lead them towards a life of crime. Any time Sean (Sean Connor) and Daro (Cameron Fulton) get the chance to cut a corner in their get-rich-quick scheme to run an ice-cream van, he stops them in their tracks. They pay a fine for forgetting to buy a licence and refuse to deal in contraband. They won’t even pass off regular milk for organic.

And although he sneaks in the phrase “comfort and joy”, in a sly reference to the Bill Forsyth movie inspired by Glasgow’s drug-related ice-cream wars, Sean and Daro Flake It ’Til They Make It is resolutely not another west-coast underworld play about turf wars, hardmen and addicts. [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).