Theatre reviews: Every One

[Shana A]

Theatre reviews: Every One/The Garden/The Hobbit

Published Date: 26 March 2010
By Joyce McMillan

http://thescotsman.scotsman.com/features/Theatre-reviews-Every-OneThe-GardenThe.6178446.jp

THE shock of bereavement – particularly when it involves the loss of someone in the prime of life – is a common human experience; thousands must live through it every day. Yet it's also an experience that our secular and youth-obsessed culture finds
extraordinarily difficult to process; and although theatre groups in Scotland have been making some bold attempts to tackle it in recent years, the shows often struggle to move beyond a sense of bewilderment, outrage and shock.

All of that changes, though, with the emergence at the Lyceum of Jo Clifford's latest play Every One, a beautiful, strange and thought-provoking meditation on the sudden death, at the age of 50 or so, of its heroine Mary, a 21st-century Everywoman who works as a tax inspector, loves her husband and teenage kids and her old Mum, and is just getting on with the ironing when death comes to claim her.