Alex Hines and Sarah Stafford have created some wonderful, monstrous women in Shayna and Beverley, the stars of BIRDS. After a chance meeting in a beach-themed void, the pair chuckle and chain-smoke their way through time. Their hair high and their SPF low, the two new friends swap anecdotes which turn sunny sands to pitch black tar.
Sitting more in theatre than comedy, the duologue straddles both genres but neither quite enough. There’s much fun to be made in their quotidian banalities about children or ex-husbands and a bird called Benadryl, but the stop-start pacing of the absurdist gags feels a little like whiplash. On the other side, the humour sits strangely alongside the slow maddening of the two women, especially when we enter a peculiar, almost possessed period of forgetting.
And with their ever-reddening bodies and radio crackle about the climate dissolving (and more), there’s certainly scope for more commentary on the dire state of the world we find ourselves in.
What Sons of Susan have created is certainly to be commended, and feels right at home pushing the boundaries between comedy and theatre (rigidly dictated by the festival). But it’s the strength of these characters which really carry the show. Transplant them to another beach, another time and we’d gladly meet them and their cigarette-butt sandcastles there.
BIRDS: Alex Hines and Sarah Stafford, Assembly George Square, until 30 Aug (not 26), 7pm