Day 6 - Acts, by Riccardo Galgani

This is the first of three plays from a triple-bill which debuted with the Traverse Theatre Company here in Edinburgh in 1999 entitled Family. Aside from being the first I knew about the theatre which is still an active hub for new work and young writers, the play itself is something rather different to anything I've really come across before.

When I was at school and doing Speech & Drama lessons and exams, we looked at Shakers (among other things) as a recent/contemporary piece, and I remember mostly hating it, and the rest. The characters seemed so shallow. I was never allowed to watch soap operas at home (Mum didn't see the point in them, and I had very little interest in any case) and I saw those plays as an extension of the genre. Acts, on the surface seems to be a similar sort of uncomfortable snapshot of every day life, this time with much older characters. The old mum seems to be not so much dying by degrees as fading away into the obscurity of dementia so fast I spent most of the reading expecting her to die onstage while the other characters were momentarily distracted doing something else.

The second reading included more carefully reminding myself of the specific stage direction at the beginning of the play - when the grown-up son in the piece gets up to move around, he must always come back to a seat with his back to the audience. Presumably having a back wall for acoustics would make this viable, but it's an interesting direction. My lasting impression of the first reading was very much that we should be sort of seeing things from his perspective, and indeed if he's sitting with his back to us, it's the other faces we'll be watching.

The title itself is rather vague at first, but it is subtlely accurate - all three (mother, father, son) are putting on acts for each other. Dad clearly feels his age, and is concerned for his wife but doesn't want to show it, particularly around his son. As for the son, it's mentioned repeatedly that he's not visited his parents in 12 years, and he dodges the question of why for most of the play, until he's finally asked a direct question - how's the wife and kids... and he simply answers "I don't know". For that alone, there's a wealth of the story that we're not being told, and maybe he's come here hoping to talk about that, and decided not to when he sees how his own (original) family unit has drifted over the years. And then the wonderful moments where each parent presses money on their son while the other is out of the room, which is so touchingly true. (I remember my grandparents and my parents arguing over who was paying for dinner when I was younger.)

I'd like to see this performed, if I get the chance. It seems like there's far more to be given away to an audience between the lines than can be gathered just from reading, and many different ways it could be interpreted.