The week on stage, from the prismatic Scent of Roses to the fast and funny Moreno

The highs and lows of the week’s theatre

‘Scent of Roses’, ‘Moreno’, and ‘Death Drop’ (Matt Crockett/Tim Morozzo/Adiam Yemane)

This week’s theatre includes a whodunnit starring RuPaul’s Drag Race stars, an intricate but overstuffed duologue and an NFL locker room drama tackling racism.

The Scent of Roses – Edinburgh Lyceum ★★☆☆☆

The Scent of Roses is like some kind of prismatic puzzle. Over a series of duologues, Zinnie Harris’s new play presents an interconnected cross-section of Scottish society – a husband and wife, their daughter and her ex-teacher, that teacher and her mother – with each conversation shedding fresh light on the one that’s gone before it. Like most of Harris’s plays and adaptations over the past two decades, it is intricate and emotionally intelligent – but it is also overstuffed and, like a lot of puzzles, well, a bit boring.

The first scene sees middle-aged mother Luci (Neve McIntosh) lock her cheating lawyer husband Christopher (Peter Forbes) in their shared bedroom, and refuse to let him out until he admits to his affairs. The second sees their deranged daughter Caitlin (Leah Byrne) arrive at her former teacher’s flat, upset and inexplicably covered in blood. The third sees that ex-teacher confront her exasperated mother over her alcoholism. And so the prism shifts, scene by scene, relationship by relationship, revelation by revelation.

There is some good stuff here. Harris also directs, and her hour-and-three-quarters-long production is artfully arranged. Designer Tom Piper’s set – a realistic bedroom, the walls of which gradually lift away over the course of the evening – is a neat reflection of the characters’ preconceptions slowly being stripped from them. The five-person cast supply strong performances, too: Byrne overdoes it a bit as Caitlin, and Saskia Ashdown underdoes it as her ex-teacher, but McIntosh and Forbes have fiery fun as Luci and Christopher, and Maureen Beattie is brilliantly blithe as the latter’s lover in the final two scenes.

Neither the performances nor the production make up for the script’s shortcomings, though. Harris’s insights into our relationships – both with each other, and with the truth – are real, but her repetitive, conversation-by-conversation structure is not an interesting way of exploring them. There are just too many words and not enough plot. Fergus Morgan

Maureen Beattie and Saskia Ashdown in ‘The Scent of Roses’ (Tim Morozzo)

Moreno – Theatre 503 ★★★☆☆

Set in an NFL team’s changing area, Pravin Wilkins’ debut play Moreno brings a whole new meaning to the phrase “locker room talk”. The year is 2016 and overpaid golden boy Luis Moreno (Sebastian Capitan Viveros) has joined a new team, ruffling feathers among fellow players Ezekiel “Zeke” Williams (Joseph Black), Cre’von Garcon (Hayden Mclean) and Danny Lombardo (Matt Whitchurch). They all have their problems, but the game always has to come first. Then Colin Kaepernick takes the knee against police violence and things begin to shift, as the players face a reality where protesting can mean losing everything.

Moreno asks big questions on stage about racism and how protest can be made appealing to “mythical conscientious white folk”. The four-man cast are the driving force behind the production, Black in particular capturing the struggle of a man used to being stoic who can’t just smile and sing in the face of injustice. As the only white member of the team, Danny, with his slicked-back hair and fancy suits, initially appears to be the pantomime villain of the piece. But as the play progresses, he gains complexity.

Wilkins’ script is fast and funny, but the humour sometimes jars with the serious subject matter. One moment the team are laughing, the next they’re having deep, exposition-heavy discussions, with little done to ease the flow between the two.

It’s often the moments when no one on stage is speaking where the really interesting stuff happens. As in the excellent Red Pitch currently running at the Bush Theatre, choreographed gameplay sequences emphasise the dance-like nature of sport. News reports and interviews with Kaepernick blast out over the sound system, before they’re reduced to tinny sounds ringing out of the team’s phones. His protest is bigger than them, and these men care, because of course they do. But they all have their own lines, lines they’re unwilling to cross until prejudice directly affects them. Isobel Lewis

Holly Stars, Vinegar Strokes, Richard Energy, Anna Phylatic, and Kitty Scott-Claus (Matt Crockett)

Death Drop – Criterion Theatre ★★☆☆☆

Death Drop should be a knockout. It has all the elements for a great time: a wealth of charismatic drag performers, impressive make-up, wigs and costumes, and audience members who are primed and ready to laugh hard. It even stars three known and loved alumni of the RuPaul’s Drag Race universe in Jujubee, Kitty Scott-Claus and Vinegar Strokes. The issue, though, lies in the play’s heavy reliance on the crowd’s goodwill and the pull of its stars without the material to make them shine.

Set in 1991, the action takes place at a celebratory dinner honouring Charles and Diana’s 10th wedding anniversary. A group of strangers arrive at Lady von Fistenburg’s remote country house for the occasion; guests include a nosy newspaper editor, an oversexed TV wannabe and a one-hit-wonder named Shazza. One by one, guests start perishing in weird and ridiculous ways. There’s a killer on the loose – but will they figure out who it is before it’s too late?

What could have been a fun, campy murder mystery, though, simply doesn’t have enough original jokes to make it that. Everyone does the best with what they’ve been given: Holly Stars (the show’s creator) gives an especially energetic turn as triplet maids The Bottomley Sisters. But once the glitz and the initial excitement of seeing the performers on stage wears off, you start to wonder what the point of it all is. With comedy being more Death Drop’s goal than genuine intrigue, an ambling, confused plot could be forgiven if the humour held up. But sadly, it takes more than a few repeated refrains and the odd lewd gesture to stop the experience feeling like, well, a drag. Nicole Vassell