Yellow Moon

Published Monday 6 August 2007 at 12:50 by Gerald Berkowitz

David Greig’s play, commissioned for performances to young Scottish audiences, places a familiar plot in a very specific context that redefines and renews it. A teenage boy and girl tentatively connect, and when an almost accidental killing puts him on the run, she goes along. What keeps this from being just another Bonnie-and-Clyde rerun is the fact that neither is really criminal. Both are simply lost and unhappy adolescents, and the sad fact is that this adventure is the most real and alive thing they’ve experienced.

Still, they are products of their time and place, and the source of much of the play’s emotional power comes from the recognition of how often they come close to something resembling modest, ordinary happiness, only to miss it as some invisible wall of class, self-perception or imagination keeps them from seeing and grabbing it.

This is a small and subtle insight, and in performance one is too much aware of how little actually happens, and how cliched much of that is. This sense of dramatic thinness is compounded by a presentational mode that devotes perhaps 80% of the text to description and narration, the cast of four taking turns telling us what the characters are thinking, feeling and doing as they act the moments out.