Yellow Moon

A thrilling, dynamic play that stimulates childlike wonder, Yellow Moon is a testament to Grieg's exceptional talent for storytelling

★★★★★
archive review (edinburgh) | Read in About 2 minutes
33330 large
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Published 05 Aug 2007
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100487 original
My reasonably trustworthy sense of reality tells me that Yellow Moon was a production that took place in a small, intimate space comprising four actors and four chairs. Yet when I let my mind drift back to the story it told, I can only remember seeing barren slopes, a deer in the forest, a loch, kids on the run and a full yellow moon.

David Grieg’s jagged love story is a voracious beast that will consume you whole and hold you captive in its belly. Every moment in this explosively fast-paced play is an electric shock that progressively seizes your nervous system until you are utterly stunned, unable to operate that part of the brain that tempers your imagination.

The story told in Yellow Moon is the adventure that Silent Leila has always been reaching out for fruitlessly. Only when a chance encounter with local ned Stag Lee MacAlinden evolves into a fugitive journey to the highlands does her life begin to make sense. “I feel like I’m real and in a story,” she proclaims, summing up in a sentence the celebrity-obsessed spirit of our times.

Andrew Scott-Ramsay and Nalini Chetty are both mesmerising as the troubled adolescents, portraying complex characters with supreme confidence. Keith Macpherson and Beth Marshall are no less affecting in the adult roles, and in particular their vivacious treatment of the shared narrator's role wrap the central undertakings in a gloriously adrenalised context.

Yellow Moon is a thrilling, dynamic play that stimulates childlike wonder, and above all it is a testament to Grieg's exceptional talent for storytelling.