Fetch

Fetch, the debut from Leith-based company Twa Dugs Theatre, is a new play about an old, thorny topic: how men in Scotland communicate—or fail to communicate—with one another.

Set in the Central Belt, the narrative pivots around two very different siblings: Douglas, who left for university, and his younger brother Andy, who remained at home to work. The death of their father, David, who for a time left the family home while the children were young, brings the pair back together, but both find talking about emotions and feelings as difficult as ever.

Told through a mixture of flashbacks and scenes from the day of David’s funeral, we build up an image of a family dynamic left rotten by silence. Unable to speak of his sense of being trapped, 30-year-old David abandons his family; Douglas can’t articulate his anger at his father or the truth of his own sexuality; and emotionally stunted Andy cheats on his girlfriend rather than address his fear of commitment. Meanwhile, Poppy the dog is the family’s only source of therapy.

Written in a sanitised Scots—there’s no shortage of kens, hooses, touns and dinnaes—lan Gordon’s script offers an unashamedly regional voice, while Lewis Kennan, as Douglas, and Iain Rutherford, as Andy and David, are well-cast and believable.   

Poignant, challenging but also sympathetic, Fetch is a timely and welcome examination of the culture of silence that all too often pervades, and slowly destroys, human relations.