It takes David Greig – the man behind the huge Traverse hit, Midsummer – to combine formal experiment with the big themes of the year in a way that leaves audiences feeling delighted and somehow empowered, as well as moved.
Brewers Fayre is a play about a trapped couple and an unhappy young girl, haunted by fears of environmental catastrophe, and of dying without that classic moment of bliss that makes life worthwhile.
The playwright himself plays the depressed middle-aged man at the heart of the story; but the trick is that the audience too gets to perform, reading the part of a middle-aged woman in search of internet love from a script projected before our eyes.
In the show I attended, we – the audience – did brilliantly, in a strange and unique demonstration of the wisdom of crowds.
And although Greig’s play lasts barely 40 minutes, it seems to me a small classic of our time; full of questioning and tenderness about our sometimes desperate strategies for making life worth living, and about the possible role of theatre in bringing us comfort and giving us strength for tough times ahead.
