Writer: Penelope Skinner
Director: Eddie Boyce
There’s an ominous sound of waves on shingle and unsettling discordant music. The first scene in Eigengrau takes place on a beach. Grieving Tim Muffin addresses his dead nan while clutching a cat-shaped jar of her ashes. A few moments later, half-dressed marketer Mark stumbles into the living room of a flat, where professional activist Cassie is writing a speech on her laptop.
Their prickly, interrupting conversation is characteristic of playwright Penelope Skinner’s comic observational brilliance. Forthright Cassie, perfectly realised by Neila Stephens, tells Mark: “I work for a feminist organisation? I’m an activist …” to which he replies that he “Didn’t know people still did that kind of thing” and she asks archly “Feminism?” Mark is clearly attracted to Cassie as a challenge for his womanising prowess, and Tom Zachar gives the role a successful swagger, compellingly charming-but-unpleasant.
Four young people cross paths in the lonely vastness of early-21st-century London. Loveable loser Tim (played with poignant vulnerability by Joe Urquhart) lives with Mark, who is an old university friend. Cassie has found a flatmate on Gumtree: Rose, embodied with total conviction by Hannah Noël Brennan. Rose, obsessionally in love with Mark after a brief encounter, is literally away with the fairies, believing in angels, numerology, astrology, signs, portents, and happy endings. The cast and director Eddie Boyce, all graduates of the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, are outstanding.
Eigengrau, Skinner’s second play, premiered at the Bush Theatre in 2010, earning her an Evening Standard “Most Promising Playwright” nomination. After bluntly calling her first play about sexual (mis)alliances Fucked, Skinner explores some of the same topics, but picks a title that is mysterious, bordering on the pretentiously obscure. The German word Eigengrau is glossed as “the colour seen by the eye in perfect darkness” and becomes vaguely, variously significant over the course of the play.
Together, Stephens and Zachar formed the Mop and Bucket Theatre Company during their first show at the Edinburgh Fringe in 2022. They have previously produced Mike Bartlett’s two-hander An Intervention, another complicated and politically engaged drama and will be back later this year with The Night Before Christmas.
Technical designer Maddy Whitby creates disturbing scenic shifts, flooding the stage at key moments with disembodied noise and blood red or purple lights. In between the scenes, a fragmented mosaic of voices advertise for flatmates, dates, hook-ups in an unsettling portrait of city life: “sense of humour/honest, clean/no husbands, no expectations, no mind games/jeans and a T-shirt and likes sucking cock/Central, Jubilee, District and Circle/no fat men, no dramas, no baggage…”
About two-thirds of the way through, there’s a “hydration break” (aka an interval). The shorter second part packs in a horribly intimate blow job scene, really bad karaoke, and further unexpected twists. The show’s excellence is partly thanks to Skinner’s well-crafted script, which avoids easy answers and allows each character a very human moral ambiguity. Like the mixed-up love scenes from Midsummer Night’s Dream crossed with the violence of King Lear, this is a startling, thought-provoking play. The four actors give extraordinary performances as they explore Eigengrau’s messy themes of sex, death, money, and obsession.
Runs until 28 August 2026
The Reviews Hub Star Rating
90%
Ambiguity and obsession