Where do we draw the line between a white lie, an infidelity and a Trumpian fantasy? When does being economical with the truth become a betrayal? Can we keep a secret without it corroding our sense of self and poisoning our relationships?
These are the questions writer-director Zinnie Harris threads through The Scent of Roses, a restless, squirming quest for the truth – or if not that, then at least a conversation about the truth. Sometimes funny, frequently disorientating, it is a bold drama that worries away at its theme to create a compelling study of evasion and responsibility.
If we can’t be honest with ourselves, let alone each other, Harris seems to say, can we ever escape the lies? And if we cannot be straight about the smallest things, what hope do we have of resolving dilemmas on a global scale?
With an adventurous structure worthy of a Caryl Churchill play and staccato exchanges recalling Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, it begins in a middle-class Edinburgh bedroom where a couple are winding down after a tough day.
It could be the setting of a cosy sitcom if only Neve McIntosh’s Luci were not so scary in her resolve. She has decided it is time for honesty from her husband, Christopher, played by Peter Forbes as a man-child enjoying a life of happy unaccountability, quite unprepared for his wife’s scrutiny. Yet Luci, too, has her own secrets.
As Tom Piper’s interior set expands and fractures, so the play pulls apart the fault lines between discretion and dishonesty. The mood shifts to heightened realism as their daughter Caitlin enters with a bloodied bird, Leah Byrne revelling in her role as unreliable narrator as she confronts Saskia Ashdown’s depressive Sally, her former teacher who is burdened by repressed guilt.
Only Maureen Beattie’s Helen, whose connection with the others is revealed late in the play, shows a breezy acceptance of the past, yet even she is shaped by deceits old and new.
There are shades of Ibsen in this confrontation with the lies of the past, but Harris has no neat Victorian resolution. Instead, she questions and teases in a knotty, unending search for openness.
At the Royal Lyceum, Edinburgh, until 19 March
