Douglas Maxwell's touching dog-walker play fetches more plaudits

The National

16 hours ago

The winning plays – The Sheriff Of Kalamaki (2023-24) and So Young (2024-25) – speak to the profound humanism, the insightful humour and the poetic sensibility in his writing. So, too, does Man's Best Friend – a piece originally written for the lunchtime theatre A Play, A Pie And A Pint – which is now being staged in a new, slightly longer version by the Tron.
In this cleverly-structured monodrama, the excellent Jordan Young takes on the role of Ronnie, a young man from Edinburgh who resides in Glasgow, but never quite feels that he belongs there. A professional dog walker, he stumbled into his line of work almost accidentally while walking his own dog during the Covid pandemic.
READ MORE: 'Completely unprecedented': BBC cuts live feed for Kneecap Glastonbury performance
In the play's very funny first half, Ronnie wanders around designer Becky Minto's ingenious, quasi-abstract set (which manages to evoke simultaneously the paths and hills of Ronnie's walks and the solitary domesticity of his home life). As he does so, he regales us with hilarious tales of the trials and tribulations of walking five dogs attached to the 'central belt'; the dog-walking device he created and which he wears around his waist.
Ronnie's encounters with a macho dog trainer and a hippy-ish animal lover are a source of tremendous comedy. So, too, are the dog walker's embarrassed recollections of the incident in which one of the pooches in his care managed to ingest a significant quantity of a well-known energy drink (the consequences of which would be best described as scatological).
As Ronnie introduces us to his five charges – Albert (his own dog), Coriander, Fury, Carlos and Rex – illustrator Ross Collins offers us charming canine animations which are projected cleverly onto the set.
To synopsise the second half of the play in any detail would be to commit a crime of spoiling so grave as to merit one being dragged through park mud by five energetic mutts. Suffice it to say that a dramatic, dog-related discovery takes Ronnie – and us, the theatre audience – into an emotional space that is radically different from the light-heartedness of the play's opening section.
As Ronnie recalls two parallel stories of love and loss, the almost forensically empathetic dimension in Maxwell's writing comes to the fore. The turn in the narrative is executed to great dramatic effect, not only in the author's writing and Young's compelling performance, but also in Minto's set, which (with the help of Grant Anderson's superb lighting design) is transformed powerfully.
Director Jemima Levick's production is sensitive and precise in equal measure. Patricia Panther's sound and music are appropriately atmospheric.
What begins as a humorous monologue about professional dog walking ends as a touching and hopeful play about our collective experience of Covid and the universal experience of grief.