| Review by Mhari Hetherington, April 2006
An up right piano sits in the Quinn family’s kitchen, it looks a little grand and out of place considering the surrounding dirty pots piled high in the kitchen sink not to mention the general squalour of all the flats in the tenement. The piano belongs to Elizabeth Gordon Quinn who can neither afford to have a piano nor does she have the skill to play the thing. This piano is her dearest possession, she loves it probably more than her own grown up children and much maligned husband. She loathes anything that is reminiscent of her father who “shovelled shite” or the working class that she cannot stand to be apart of. Elizabeth Gordon Quinn is a complex mixture of delusion, passion and pretension. She is a magnificent anti-heroine that any audience will both love and despise and she is the subject of the play of the same name that has been revived and rewritten by the National Theatre of Scotland and playwright Chris Hannan respectively.
The play is set in a Glasgow tenement during the rent strikes of 1915 where Elizabeth tries to disassociate herself from her working class neighbours by refusing to join them in the strike. Only once the bailiff takes her piano away does Elizabeth consider joining the strike so she can use her strikers and sympathisers to reclaim her most prized possession. Once the instrument has been reclaimed it is easy for her to push her all those who had helped her and even her own husband away for demonstrating working class songs and jokes around her precious piano. She drives the last of the men in her life away and is left with two very bitter children and friends that she wishes not even to associate herself with.
Despite the bleak surroundings this play has some incredibly comic moments although John Tiffany’s production thrives equally in Hannan’s witty dialogue and in the beauty of Elizabeth’s delusions. The characters are brought to life by an excellent cast, notably Billy McColl and Myra McFadyen, but there is definitely a star in Cara Kelly whose incredible performance encourages simultaneously an audience’s sympathy and disgust in equal measure. Her creation of Elizabeth is only so enjoyable though due to Hannan’s writing in crafting this fantastic role, rewritten as more of a psychological study than a political statement. The result is a solid production with plenty of enjoyable moments and a heroine for audiences to loathe and love.
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