Theatre

The Weir Sisters

Oran Mor, Glasgow

Mary Brennan, four stars

MORTALITY is a topic that doesn’t immediately bring on a fit of the giggles. Writer Lynn Ferguson nonetheless knows how to spin a potentially bleak prospect into a comedy that looks on death – and decides it could have a "happy-ever-after" twist to it. Her flipside to the finality of dying is The Weir Sisters, a warm-hearted, humorous salute to the family ties and loving memories that live on, even after close kin have become "the dear departed."

Sisters Grace (Meghan Tyler) and Margaret (Sandra McNeeley) have already passed through the (back-projected) Pearly Gates and have acclimatised to an afterlife with never-ending sherry and party food. Grace, aged 22, died in the 1940s, Margaret (aged 63) joined her in 1988, now they’re waiting for 97 year old sister Dorothy (Deborah Arnott) to arrive and round out their bantering reminiscences for all eternity. We’re not talking Sartre’s Huit Clos, here, where hell is other people. Think, rather, of those 1940s' feel-good fantasies – like The Bishop’s Wife – where second chances and wish projections materialise and there’s a positive glow to the old-fashioned sentimentality.

What keeps this one-act from being mawkish is the element of tragedy that Ferguson weaves, convincingly, into the sisters’ past lives. Each one has suffered heartbreak, disappointment, even shocking brutality and it’s this harsh reality that an outstanding cast, caringly guided by director Alison Peebles, revisit with varying degrees of acceptance and self-awareness. However Arnott’s superbly nuanced Dorothy, sloughing off elderly traits (and care home clothes), is still gripped by an age-old anguish that not even death can erase. But in this genial domain, when the bell tolls, it can bring new beginnings to those whose lives, and hopes, have ended. It’s a laughter-through-tears end to the season, folks: a hankie might be useful.