Group Portrait In A Summer Landscape
By Peter Arnott, Royal Lyceum Edinburgh 

THIS is an extraordinary play. It equates the inability to grieve with the loss of faith in socialism, and demonstrates at a human level how this paralyses the ability to act or think politically.

A loose family group assemble at a house in rural Scotland in the summer before the independence referendum, and the dialogue captures the way that binary choice, yes or no, infiltrated conversations and lives.

Unlike the Brexit vote two years later, that channelled anti-establishment rage and was led by the right to a majority, playwright Peter Arnott’s characters are situated within the hesitant ambiguity of the Scottish left. They may have been Marxists once, but they express neither working-class resentment nor a confident vision of the future.