There is a tremendous amount of heart in this musical two-hander about the stresses of early parenthood. It is inspired by the experience of co-writer Laura Wilde and her partner Kyle Falconer, best known as singer of the View. His second solo album, No Love Songs for Laura, from 2021, provides the material for a gig-theatre chamber piece about a couple torn apart by career ambitions and postnatal depression.
The script, co-written with Johnny McKnight, is a miniature soap opera in which the needs of Lana (Dawn Sievewright), isolated and insecure as the mother of a baby boy, come into conflict with the opportunities presented to Jessie (John McLarnon), a songwriter who gets a break in America just when he is needed most at home. Many of the details of childbirth and parenthood are familiar, and there is a generic quality to the early boy-meets-girl scenes, but it is written with knowledge and compassion, and rises in intensity as Lana is overwhelmed by her mental illness.
That is in no small part thanks to Sievewright, who makes the transition from gallus girl about town to a woman too fragile to open the front door with a sensitivity that matches her formidable vocal power. In the easygoing Dundee Rep production by Andrew Panton and Tashi Gore, McLarnon exemplifies the gulf between them as he sits among the audience, chatting casually, oblivious to Lana’s distress.
The songs, arranged for keyboard and guitar by Gavin Whitworth, are equal parts tuneful and earnest, stripped down from the album versions to focus on the protagonists and the dilemma of their competing interests. That Jessie is a musician eases us into the musical-theatre world, McLarnon seeming to write songs on the hoof before Sievewright turns them into duets. Fittingly, the show cannot find its happy ending until he alights upon the missing song to reunite them.
