Contact review, Jonny Donahoe delivers a heated reunion at a bonfire of family photos

Òran Mór, Glasgow Blythe Duff and Mark Barrett are excellent as two people helplessly bound to each other in this bitter two-hander

T he arrival of a first baby changes everything. It is not just the upheaval of fitting the child into your life: the shift is also psychological. Children become parents. Parents become grandparents. Responsibility and accountability move down a generation.

That is why, in Jonny Donahoe ’s knotty, bitter two-hander, a man known only as Son (Mark Barrett) has called on Mother (Blythe Duff) after an eight-month gap. She is spikily indifferent to his appearance, here in her back garden where she is burning family photographs on a bonfire. Despite the frosty reception, he must persist.

Son’s wife Alice (pronounced Malice, according to Mother) is expecting a Christmas baby. With that in mind, he is eager to end the resentment harboured by the older woman since he was six. He wants their relationship to be civil. She is having none of it.

The damage is not in their surface chitchat. If you did not know better you could miss it. Duff captures the sparkle of Donahoe’s hard-bitten wit and can be waspishly funny. Barrett counters with low-status calm, avoiding confrontation. It could all be quite innocent.

But Mother’s lack of sentiment goes deep. Incapable of empathy, she has been brutalised by her past. “Not everything you feel has to be expressed,” she scolds her son, sounding ever more the sociopath. The shadow of Son’s abusive father looms over them, but their own personalities also play a part in a trauma that has left them stressed, depressed and trapped in a destructive cycle.

With its short, fractured sentences, the play is a tad slow, but in Ben Standish’s lunchtime production for A Play, a Pie and a Pint (with the Traverse and OneRen), Duff and Barrett are excellent in their depiction of two people helplessly bound to each other, inflicting pain even when they try to do the opposite.