They saved the best till last. Of the nine openings which constitute the bulk of this year’s Traverse programme, stripped across two full days at the beginning of the Edinburgh Fringe, it was the final one that contained one of the performances of the year. Tom Holloway’s And No More Shall We Part is a two-hander for actors of a certain age, about euthanasic suicide. As Pam, who resolves to pre-empt her unspecified terminal illness before it destroys her, Dearbhla Molloy is measured and stoical but without seeming to stint on emotion. However, it is Bill Paterson as her husband Don who is simply magnificent. He blusters, splutters and refuses to let go of a single atom of possible comfort in the prolongation of his beloved’s life. Scarcely a sentence is completed; the power is all in the break-offs, in the minimal gestures such as the way he strokes the panel of her bedroom door when sleeping before it, unable to leave for a bed of his own. It is like watching a toughened glass windscreen shatter in exquisitely slow motion.

The other picks of this year’s crop are in the smaller Traverse Two. In Mess, Caroline Horton deploys a serenity not unlike Molloy’s, in the role of an erratically recovering anorexic; despite the bleak subject matter, however, the predominant tone is a delicate whimsy not unlike Hugh Hughes’ pieces for Hoipolloi. It ought not to work, but it does, charmingly. In Bullet Catch, Rob Drummond re-creates several magic tricks over the course of an hour, culminating in the one which gives the show its title. He is ostensibly examining an instance of the trick’s failure in 1912, but covertly he meditates upon spirituality and the value of existence, all the while slowly grooming a member of the audience to fire the potentially fatal gun at him at the climax.

Back in the main house, those twin colossi, the Scottish playwriting Davids, Greig and Harrower, offer a double-bill loosely related to Scotland’s hosting of Britain’s principal nuclear naval base. In Greig’s The Letter Of Last Resort (first seen earlier this year as part of “The Bomb” package at the Tricycle in London), a Prime Minister, briefed by an unhelpfully philosophical adviser, has to decide whether to leave instructions for retaliation or non- in the event of a hypothetical future nuclear attack on Britain; in Harrower’s Good With People (from the “A Play, A Pie And A Pint” lunchtime series at Glasgow’s Óran Mór), a young man and a hotel receptionist in Helensburgh ruthlessly antagonise each other but gradually reconcile, whilst uncovering glimpses of insight into perceptions of the British military presence in civilian communities both at home and abroad.

The remainder of the Trav’s fare is competent but unexciting. After 2008’s exhilarating Once And For All… and 2010’s insulting Teenage Riot, Belgian teenager Koba Ryckewaert (now 18) returns for a third show by provocateurs Ontroerend Goed. In All That Is Wrong she spends an hour chalking a personal psychogeography on the floor. It is more performance art than theatre, and would be dull indeed except that her gradual manipulation by co-performer Zach Hatch finally raises, however vaguely and obliquely, the issue of exploitation that Ontroerend Goed are happy to foist on their audiences time and again but have never hitherto perceptibly examined in respect of themselves.

Simon Stephens’ second major opening within a week (after his adaptation of The Curious Incident Of The Dog In The Night-Time at the National Theatre), Morning, is unlikely to cause as much brouhaha as his Three Kingdoms or The Trial Of Ubu a few months ago.. As staged by Sean Holmes (in the style of his sometime collaborators Filter) for the Lyric Hammersmith’s Young Company, it portrays a sociopathic teenage girl’s impulsive murder of her boyfriend. It initially promises little more than a superior Skins-style vignette, but Stephens’ trademark spare, unflinching style gradually allows echoes of the Mary Bell case to seep through. Phil Porter’s Blink (from Soho Theatre and nabokov) and Ronan O’Donnell’s Angels (another product of the Óran Mór programme) are, respectively, a two-hander about an awkward, obsessive and ultimately abortive love affair and a solo piece in which a security guard held in police custody on (mistaken) suspicion of murder fantasises about Scarlett Johansson. Both are excellently acted – Blink by Harry McEntire and Rosie Wyatt, Angels by the redoubtable Iain Robertson – but in each case the play proves too slight to compel attention.

The final piece in this first wave of Traverse offerings follows in the wake of comedian Daniel Kitson’s successful series of storytelling shows at this venue. Kitson’s own 2012 work opens in a few days, but in the meantime Mark Thomas forsakes his blend of stand-up and activism for Bravo Figaro!, an account of his South London bruiser of a father’s unlikely passion for opera, which Thomas himself inherited. In a similar style to his past political protest stunts, Thomas organised a kind of farewell to his dementia-suffering father by wangling a group of singers from the Royal Opera House to give a recital in his parents’ Bournemouth bungalow living-room. The hour-long story is peppered with Thomas’s characteristic bluntness in comedic, political and family-nostalgic modes alike. Ultimately, though, for all his skill as a performer, it cannot transcend being so palpably the product of a deep personal need to “pay off” his memories of his father.
     
Written for the Financial Times.