Theatre reviews: I Think We Are Alone, King’s Theatre, Edinburgh | When The Penny Drops, Oran Mor, Glasgow

Simon Donaldson, Jo Freer and Michele Gallagher act up a storm

IN OUR affluent and supremely individualistic society, loneliness is a recognised problem; and so is the habit of emotional detachment that often leads us into that lonely place. Different societies, though, nurture different romantic myths about how those barriers can be overcome and Frantic Assembly’s 25th anniversary touring show, I Think We Are Alone – briefly at the King’s in Edinburgh this week – takes as its text a play by Sally Abbott that adopts a style familiar from a hundred Radio 4 dramas, in which mainly middle-class people have problems or past traumas about which they will not speak, and in which the act of finally speaking about them brings a happy ending, of sorts.

I Think We Are Alone, King’s Theatre, Edinburgh *** | When The Penny Drops, Oran Mor, Glasgow ****

So at the centre of the play’s three interwoven narrative strands, delivered via a series of monologues and dialogues, we find thirtysomething sisters Clare and Ange, played by Polly Frame and Charlotte Bate, driven apart by the fact that they cannot handle their shared memory of childhood sexual abuse by an uncle; both drink to excess, take drugs legal and illegal, and – in Clare’s case – come close to ruining their lives completely. Equally buttoned up is lonely taxi-driver Graham, the bereaved husband of a woman who recently died in the hospice where Ange works as a nurse; and also barricaded behind emotional defences is black single mother Josie, whose gifted son Mannie has made it to Cambridge, but cannot make his mother hear him through her own inner clamour of grief and bitterness.