Theatre Review: Two Sisters, Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh | The Wizard of Oz, Playhouse, Edinburgh

The Wizard of Oz, Playhouse, Edinburgh ****

Once upon a time, there was a David Greig who wrote obviously brilliant plays, with titles like San Diego and Damascus; and who seemed to inhabit a wide, wide world of political and creative possibilities. His leading characters belonged to an affluent 1990s world that seemed to be spiralling towards crisis; and they were often thrown into confrontation with the global victims of the system that gave them their comfortable lives.

​These days, though, it seems almost as if – now the crisis Greig once predicted is upon us – he feels free, as an artist, to ignore it; and so, at the Lyceum, he and director Wils Wilson present his latest play Two Sisters, a long two-act drama which contains barely a mention of the wider world, and instead plunges us into what at first seems – despite the onstage presence of a joyful chorus of young teenage performers like an old-fashioned afternoon radio play of the most irritating kind

The scene is a down-at-heel caravan park on the Fife coast, where the sisters once spent teenage holidays. The sisters are Amy, a sharp-tongued and miserable fortysomething nymphomaniac who has fled her marital home after being caught having sex with the plumber; and the equally annoying Emma, a successful lawyer married to a wealthy businessman, expecting her first baby, and entertaining ambitions – on her pre-baby retreat to Holiday Heaven – to write what sounds like a truly terrible novel.

Just when the audience might be beginning to hope that both of these tedious women will be picked off by black-clad anarchists, though, the story begins to intensify. First, they encounter the campsite disc jockey Lance, who once had a teenage love affair with Amy; and as the sisters take to a long night of drink, weed and partying, the language gradually becomes more surreal and poetic, shot through with a passionate longing for the freedom and possibility of youth, and for the magical and scary feeling of being 16.

And secondly, the chorus of young people – first only on the edges of the action – gradually find their role, inviting the audience to write down their own teenage memories and contribute them to the choral sequences, and hovering like guardian angels around the sisters, as they navigate this sudden crisis of memory and longing.

In the end, the intensity of Greig’s writing, the quiet beauty of Wils Wilson’s production, and the loving kindness of the young chorus, all combine – despite a crazily long-winded final scene – to make this a more moving plea for love and humanity, in our ageing world, than at first seems possible; and they’re helped, of course, by three fine lead performances, from Erik Olsson as Lance, Jessica Hardwick as Emma, and a blisteringly intense Shauna Macdonald, as the terrible and troubled Amy.

It’s always holiday time, meanwhile, at the Playhouse in Edinburgh, which celebrates half term week by hosting the current UK touring production of the Wizard of Oz, a fiercely psychedelic and dream-like version of the original film narrative directed by Nikolai Foster, with additional music by Andrew Lloyd Webber.

In this energetic large-scale production – featuring a cast of 20, and a ten-piece live orchestra – drag artist The Vivienne makes a spectacular villainess of The Wicked Witch Of The West; and although the show’s new music and orchestral arrangements can occasionally make the familiar songs sound oddly unrecognisable, Aviva Tulley’s strong and spirited Dorothy – backed by the fine team of Benjamin Yates, Marley Fenton and Nic Greenshields as Scarecrow, Tin Man and Cowardly Lion – makes sure that the show’s heartbeat never fails, even as we’re whirled back through some spectacular film and video sequences, to the Kansas meadow where it all began.

​Two Sisters at the Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh until 2 March. The Wizard Of Oz at the Playhouse, Edinburgh until 17 February, at the King’s Theatre, Glasgow, 2-7 July, and at His Majesty’s, Aberdeen, 9-14 July.