There will be few plays seen on a Scottish stage this year that hit as powerfully as Water Colour, let alone any written by a 21-year-old.
What is it?
The winner of the St Andrews Playwriting Award 2024, by young Glaswegian writer Milly Sweeney, is about two young people whose chance late-night meeting on a bridge over the River Clyde as one of them contemplates suicide changes both their lives in different ways.
Molly Geddes is Esme, a student at Glasgow College of Art, whose dream studies are disrupted by a crippling anxiety that her classmates are mocking her and her tutor looks down on her.
Friendless and paralysed by her fear, she dreads the thought of her high school reunion.
Meanwhile Ryan J Mackay (whose past work includes Harry Potter and the Cursed Child in the West End and the National Theatre of Scotland’s Kidnapped) is Harris.
He is over-the-moon to get his dream job in a top Glasgow kitchen, but becomes eventually beaten down by overwork and visions of Esme in the brief moment he met her at her worst.
Come for:
The fact it’s a brand new co-production between Pitlochry Festival Theatre and the Byre Theatre in St Andrews, two of the best theatres in the area.
It’s also technically the first play of Pitlochry’s always-exciting summer season, although this year’s was programmed before new artistic director Alan Cumming took over.
Director Sally Reid (a hit as an actor in Pitlochry’s Shirley Valentine and in Scot Squad on the BBC) will rightly draw people in too.
She did a great job of Dundee Rep’s hit Jim McLean bioplay Smile.
And here she’s on to another winner, directing her two immensely talented young leads with lots of heart and energy, not to mention really landing the funny lines.
Stay for:
Quite simply, Sweeney’s script is the real deal.
A perfect insight into the trials of youth and young adulthood, it’s truthful, funny and beautifully observed.
Plus the perfect structure ebbs and flows as each character’s fate plays out like a reverse image of the other.
Avoid if:
There’s really no reason to avoid this wonderful play and every reason to see it if you can.
But for those who appreciate trigger warnings, it does very realistically depict two characters in the throes of mental breakdown.
Verdict
4/5
Water Colour was seen at Pitlochry Festival Theatre. It is at the Byre Theatre, St Andrews, on Wednesday May 28 and Thursday May 29 2025.Â
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