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Traverse 1 at Traverse Theatre
You can’t go wrong with Elaine. That’s just a fact of life, like death and taxes and Fringe queues in the rain. And when the playwright has written a part specifically at the request of her own grandmother, insisting that only Elaine C Smith could play her, you already know before the lights go up that this one’s going to land.
Cathy is Eilidh Loan’s new comedy, playing at Traverse 1, and it’s her second play after Moorcroft, the true story of her dad’s amateur football team that opened to critical acclaim when she directed it at the Tron in Glasgow. This time she’s turned the lens on her grandmother Cathy, and how she dealt with grief, in her own singular way, after losing her husband. Elaine C Smith takes the title role, joined by Michele Gallagher, Chloe Hodgson, Alan Orr and Sally Reid.
Grief is a horrible thing to go through. It’s raw, it’s painful, and half the time you don’t even know how to explain it to the people around you. What this play does so well is find the exact right note for that pain, without ever losing its sense of humour. That’s a genuinely hard balance to strike and Loan has bottled it perfectly, then handed the whole thing to Elaine to pour out for us.
And pour it out she does. That tone you’d expect and hope for from Elaine comes through in spades, the sharp tongue, the wit, all of it landing exactly where it should. The rest of the cast are fantastic too, and the staging is really cleverly done, working hard without ever showing off about it.
I caught the last performance of the run, which feels bittersweet now, but I have a strong feeling this isn’t the last we’ll see of Cathy. Other stages feel inevitable. The telly, even, wouldn’t shock me one bit.