A Slow Air

Time Out says

Fri Apr 13 2012

Give points to Scottish writer-director David Harrower for truth in advertising: His sibling two-hander, A Slow Air, is leisurely indeed—soporific, for those not sufficiently caffeinated. Burly but kindhearted flooring businessman Athol (Lewis Howden) has been estranged from his prickly, volatile sister, Morna (Susan Vidler), for 14 years. Their intersecting monologues culminate in a reunion, if not a rapprochement. Incidental or causal background figures include Morna’s vaguely morbid adult son and two Islamic radicals whose lives brushed up against Athol’s in small-town Scotland.

Harrower’s writerly piece is slender and understated to a fault, resembling more a story he might submit to Granta than a text crying out to be staged (closing your eyes and imagining it as radio drama improves the author’s cramped staging). The fault doesn’t really lie with the two performers; Howden has a ruddy bearishness that contrasts nicely with Vidler’s pinched, gray angularity. But the connections between a botched act of violence (“Trust Scotland to produce such crap terrorists,” goes one of the better lines) and the emotional brutality that seems to underlie Morna and Athol’s relationship never snap into relief.

Harrower is a stark, honest writer who can turn bluntness and banality into lyric virtues, but he’s done much better work with the premise of a man and a woman meeting after a lengthy separation. It was the bruising and tense New York premiere of Blackbird in 2007, an experience I’d rather have had a second time than A Slow Air once.—David Cote