This week's theatre in Scotland: Until It’s Gone, Burning Bright and Queer, There and Everywhere reviews

A Play, a Pie and a Pint – Glasgow’s extraordinarily prolific programme of lunchtime theatre – returned last week with Alison Carr’s Until It’s Gone (★★★★). A co-production with Stellar Quines, it arrives at Edinburgh’s Traverse Theatre this week and is well worth catching.

Set in a deteriorating dystopian world in which all women have mysteriously disappeared, it tracks the evolving relationship between a young man and an old-timer, who has been instructed to interact by some government scheme designed to foster connections in a female-free world. Director Caitlin Skinner stages their frosty meetings at a broken park bench with wit and warmth.

As the two men gradually thaw over 45 minutes of conversation, Carr skilfully mines this slightly surreal sci-fi spin for real emotion, aided by two terrific performances from Sean Connor and Billy Mack. The former is anxious and animated, the latter gruff and grumpy. The issue of male loneliness is aired and explored with imagination and tenderness.

PPP’s second offering is currently at Glasgow’s Oran Mor, before following Until It’s Gone to Edinburgh next week. Written by Orkney-based theatremaker Áine King and directed by Scottish Opera’s Roxana Haines, Burning Bright (★★★) is this season’s winner of the David MacLennan Award for new writers. It’s a heartfelt, hectic piece about the climate crisis, let down by an awkward structure.

Three unrelated stories intertwine: a family, forced to flee India due to drought, meets a hostile reception in Scotland; a woman faces down a fascist on an environmental cruise in the Arctic Ocean; and a news reporter races against wildfires in an unspecified country, presumably Australia.

Haines’ lively staging showcases three punchy performances from Adam Buksh, Suzanne Magowan and rising star Hannah Jarrett-Scott, who was recently so good in Isobel McArthur’s Pride and Prejudice (*Sort Of). King’s writing lyrically evokes some eye-popping imagery – a whale emerging from the waves, a galloping horse on fire – but the bitty, monologue chunk-by-chunk format quickly grows dry and dull.

Meanwhile, Sound Stage, Pitlochry Festival Theatre’s programme of audio work, continues to evolve in interesting ways. It started with a series of plays during lockdown, then branched out to include a docudrama about Nan Shepherd last autumn and, in January, a triptych of monologues about black British identity. Now, for LGBT+ history month, it presents Queer, There and Everywhere (★★★), a quick collection of essays, explainers and more from 15 emerging writers.

Co-created by PFT associate Ben Occhipinti and Emma Barr of Swindon-based Prime Theatre, it is a patchwork of emotions and experiences, variously angry and entertaining, incorporating everything from soliloquies by lesbian pirates to lessons in LGBT+ language to instant responses to the Westminster’s blocking of Holyrood’s gender reform bill. It makes an intimate and insightful hour of audio.