Cathy ★★★★★

The thing about the Edinburgh Fringe is that one moment you’re enjoying a performance from a household name, next you’re savouring the work of a new talent. With Cathy, a new play by exciting up-and-coming writer (and director) Eilidh Loan and starring Scottish acting royalty Elaine C Smith, you get both. In a truly mediocre “Travfest” line-up at the Traverse Theatre, Cathy is one of the few shows that truly delivers on what it says on the tin, with Smith absolutely the jewel of their Fringe crown.

Following the funeral of her husband Tommy, Cathy (Elaine C Smith) is attempting to navigate widowhood, her own grief, and the small matter of continuing to be herself when everyone around her seems determined to have an opinion about how she should be. Her daughter Flo (Michele Gallagher) is struggling with her own loss, while pregnant Amy (wonderful casting with Chloe Hodgson) has hopes of bringing a little family harmony to proceedings, an ambition that perhaps deserves a medal for optimism. While Cathy finds an unlikely outlet for her grief in a charity shop, old tensions resurface, and mother and daughter struggle to say what they actually mean; Cathy becomes less about tidy resolutions and more about how unresolved family tensions can be as messy as a charity shop clothes rack.

Loan’s script may not have much to surprise you, but feel the quality of the structuring. This is a writer who knows how to tell a story well. Pitched somewhere between a well-observed working-class sitcom and a bittersweet TV drama, the dialogue switches effortlessly between the laugh-out-loud one-liners and moments of relatable pathos.

Apparently real-life Cathy, Eilidh’s grandmother, insisted that Elaine C. Smith must play her and what a coup that is. To call Smith a comedic actress, because of roles in Rab C Nesbitt, the Jennifer Saunders sitcom The Life and Times of Vivienne Vyle, and her glorious work on Two Doors Down, is to understate the breadth of her talent. There’s a familiar comic delivery as Cathy rails at the priest conducting her husband’s funeral for “no wearing any fucking socks.” But when she, as “a good Catholic wummin”, asks the Gay Jesus crucifix that she accidentally took home from the charity shop, “to stop the pain”, you realise that Smith is an acting powerhouse who can change the mood from belly laughs to pin-drop silence like few performers can. She moulds Cathy into this pigheaded, stubborn, proud, acerbic, vulnerable, and most of all recognisable Scottish matriarch.

Kudos to Chloe Hodgson for holding her own as Cathy’s granddaughter. Her performance as Amy sensitively channels the playwright’s obvious adoration and occasional frustration with her grandmother. Hodgson’s chemistry with Smith feels warm and natural and signals great things yet to come for the younger actress.

Ultimately, people will come to see the Scottish National treasure gifting them another delicious, entertaining creation, and to adopt the vernacular of the play, Elaine C Smith plucks the audience’s heartstrings like a fucking Stradivarius.