THE TIMES – Robert Dawson Scott – 11th October 2011 – Macfie Hall, Heriot

We were not many who found our way through the blustery showers to the village hall in Heriot, a tiny community high in the Moorfoot hills where Midlothian gives way to the Borders.  And once inside the weather was pretty rough too, the wind a constant backdrop to the lonely cottage – on just such a Borders hillside the latest Rowan Tree theatre production unfolds.

But those who made it were rewarded with a very decent psychological thriller by Tom Murray, played out in more or less real time.  The reason why Emma James has come to see Robert Preston, whose cottage it is, after what has clearly been months if not years of tense negotiation, is because the two of them need each other to escape from the bleakest of relationships.  He is the son of the man who murdered her mother.  They were both eight at the time.

Exactly who is more dependent on the other, and for what, is teased out by Murray in the sort of naturalistic dialogue that might almost be the stuff of a one-off TV drama.  He has been permanently damaged by something he was not responsible for.  She is the only person who understands this.  But a camera would get restless at the focus on the single room, whereas on stage that intensity is exactly what helps to build the drama.

It would be a shame to say exactly how the final minutes play out, so let’s just say that Murray does not pull his punches.  And neither do the two first-rate performers, Lesley Hart and Jordan Young.  Young in particular shows a side to his talent that is a long way from the daft laddie television comedy roles that made his name.

Rowan Tree has worked hard to sustain professional touring theatre in the scattered communities in the Borders in the face of bureaucratic indifference at both local and national level.  The work here may be small in scale, the venue modest.  But the quality of what is on offer more than justifies their struggle.

THE SCOTSMAN – Joyce McMillan - 11th October 2011 - Coldingham Village Hall

The wind howls, and the house is as cold and bleak as any dank, neglected cottage on a remote Scottish hillside.  If a man has been living here, he has been allowing himself few comforts; and it’s into this chill space that Emma James steps, at the beginning of Tom Murray’s intense 70-minute play for the Borders touring company Rowan Tree.  A bitter young woman visibly shaking with anger, she waits for the man who lives here; and it turns out, after a few minutes of conversation almost strangled by her rage and his fear, that he is the son of the man who, 20 years ago, viciously murdered her mother in this same glen, leaving Emma’s life blighted by loss.
It’s a brilliant situation that Tom Murray sets up in this new Rowan Tree play, full of possibilities for debate around issues of crime, punishment, sin and redemption.  A generation ago, most people would have considered it obvious that Robert Preston Junior – superbly played here by Jordan Young, opposite Lesley Hart’s equally fine Emma – carries no responsibility for his father’s crime, committed when he was only eight; but in our new age of genetic determinism, both he and Emma seem seized by the conviction that any ordinary anger he feels, or violent impulse he experiences, signals that he, too, is a killer at heart.
In the end, Murray doesn’t quite succeed in developing the full dramatic potential of his story; the mood – enhanced by the howling wind of John Carnegie’s production – is too relentlessly miserable to allow for any glimmer of hope, the end too grimly sensational.  The play stands, though, as a useful warning about the death-dealing horror of any creed that allows for no redemption, and no change; and offers an unusually intense theatrical experience to audiences in Biggar, Carlops, Coldstream and Yetholm, as it tours on this week.

SOUTHERN REPORTER – Amy MacNaughton – 20th October 2011 – seen at Bowhill Theatre

Drama that stays with you long after curtain falls

Sins of the Father, by Tom Murray, and directed by John Carnegie, is one of the most compelling pieces of theatre that I have seen in a long time.

From start to finish you are wondering how the two characters, Emma James (Lesley Hart) and Robert Preston, Junior (Jordan Young) ended up in a small cottage in the Borders – with nothing more than a chair, table and basic cooking facilities.

Emma, a haunted young woman who can’t get a face out of her mind, and Robert Preston Junior, consumed with guilt because of his past, somehow, though, have been drawn together.

It was not until the last few minutes of this Rowan Tree Theatre production that I’d worked out how these two people were brought together – it was thrilling.

The acting by Hart and Young was so intense that you actually forget you are watching a play.

You won’t get much better entertainment in the Borders for a long time – it is a play which stays with you longer than the hour that it lasts.

© Copyright 2011 by Rowan Tree Theatre Company