Review by Jen
Someone’s Knockin’ at the Door by multi-award-winning playwright Milly Sweeney is a charming little story about a young couple in 1970s Glasgow taking a road trip to meet their idol, Paul McCartney. It comes to the Traverse Theatre as part of the A Play, A Pie and A Pint series. Taking the form of a recorded interview with their granddaughter Molly, who is featuring them in her project on ‘Untold Scottish Stories’, the play jumps between past and present with a series of simple yet effective sound and lighting transitions.
Escaping Glasgow in the stiflingly hot summer of ’76, working class parents Jack and Cathy take a camping trip to rural Campbeltown, where, incidentally, Jack’s personal hero Paul McCartney has recently settled. Granted a ‘treasure map’ to Paul’s house by the campsite manager, the ever-optimistic Jack drags the reluctant Cathy on an adventure to find him. Jonathan Watson and Maureen Carr are fantastic as the bickering couple, moving between narration and action smoothly. Their timing is impeccable and chemistry endearing, and it is impossible not to feel connected to their story. Young parents forced to have a ‘shotgun wedding’ during a recession in working-class Glasgow, these are two people who must give up their dreams – for Jack, becoming an artist, for Cathy, as yet undefined. This is where their love for music comes from; Sweeney’s writing celebrates the power of music to take us away from the quotidian, and the play swells with reverence for music, memories and stories. In a beautifully tactile description, Cathy recounts the joy of hunting for and finding a record, and the escapism from poverty and happiness music can offer. As Jack poignantly tells us, ‘music was my religion – it made me feel connected to something bigger than myself’.
Milly Sweeney’s writing is phenomenal, brought to life by thoughtful direction from Sally Reid. It wastes no words, moving between humour and heart lyrically. It is through this incredibly human exploration of love that we see Jack and Cathy not just as stereotypically argumentative parents, but as two young people with dreams pushed into roles that don’t fit them as individuals. As Cathy devastatingly realises, the pair have nothing in common except their child and love for the Beatles. Their eventual divorce is not sad, then, but framed as a positive step towards happiness for each of them – they have, much like Lennon and McCartney, grown out of each other.
Someone’s Knockin’ on the Door is, on the surface, a quaint and enjoyable comedy-drama about a bickering couple on a far-fetched ‘goose chase’ to meet their hero. Yet, underneath, it speaks to a truth inside all of us – our desire to do better, to be better, and to continue dreaming beyond our means. As Jack admits towards the end of the play, ‘if I can meet a Beatle in real life, I can do anything I set my mind to’. These are characters so loveable and human that the play’s ending is met with gasps of joy from the audience – after an odyssey of searching, reading maps upside-down and mistakenly detouring to a weed farm, Jack and Cathy successfully meet their idol. Paul McCartney invites them in for a tea and a whisky, and as Linda prepares them a feast of sandwiches (vegetarian, of course), signs a postcard for their infant son. This, along with the whole exhilarating adventure, is passed onto their granddaughter Molly, given the gift of a truly inspiring ‘untold Scottish story’.
Someone’s Knockin’ at the Door is a small but mighty play packed with humour and heart. It was produced by A Play, A Pie and A Pint at Òran Mór, co-presented with Aberdeen Performing Arts, Pitlochry Festival Theatre and Traverse Theatre. It was performed at the Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh from Tuesday 3rd – Saturday 7th March.
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You can check out Traverse Theatre's other A Play, A Pie and A Pint offerings by visiting https://www.traverse.co.uk/whats-on/a-play-a-pie-and-a-pint
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