Pamela Ghislain’s play about a young woman’s battle for gender equality is captured to near perfection at Oran Mor, writes Joyce McMillan
Published 23rd Oct 2026, 16:50 BST
Lune, Oran Mor, Glasgow ★★★★★
Tristan & Yseult, Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh ★★★★★
How do people respond when the structural injustice they face becomes too much, and the official systems supposed to deal with it are clearly failing? It’s a question worth asking, in this decade when the very idea of international justice is being bulldozed before our eyes; and Pamela Ghislain’s beautiful short play Lune, first seen in Belgium in 2023, imagines a world in which one determined young woman brings a lawsuit against the Belgian state, for its failure to deliver on the promise of gender equality.
Lune, though, doesn’t just bring the case, and secure the pro bono services of a top lawyer to represent her. She also refuses to leave the doorstep of the Court after filing her complaint, setting up a one-woman sit-in there, and then starting a hunger strike.
In Ghislain’s play - now at A Play, A Pie and A Pint, in a luminous translation by Katherine Mendelsohn - Lune’s story is told not so much in her own voice, (which she uses quietly and sparingly), as through her impact on the play’s two other characters. Lune’s lawyer Gabriel is a cynical and ambitious character, whose high-earning, fast-buck legal world is shaken to the core by Lune’s intense presence; Daria is a harassed working wife and mother who, as the Court’s reception clerk, finds herself on the front line of Lune’s protest.
Wils Wilson’s Play, Pie and Pint production - co-produced with the UK Institut Francais - captures all of this to near perfection, on a thrust stage backed by Joe Miles’s powerful moving images of the ocean of which Lune dreams, also reflected in an astonishing soundscape created by Luke Sutherland.
The heart of the show, though, lies in three beautiful performances from Kim Allan as Lune herself, Andrew Rothney as the increasingly humbled Gabriel, and a brilliant Nalini Chetty as Daria, gradually moving from acceptance of a life dominated by domestic lists of which she has to recall every detail without praise or acknowledgement, to pure rage at the husband who cannot even remember the one item on one of those lists with which she has entrusted him.
There is something slightly odd, perhaps, about Lune’s complete isolation as she begins her struggle; she seems to have no mother, no sister, no friends. If she comes and goes like some strange visiting angel, though, there’s no doubt that she has a transformative impact on the lives of those around her; leaving Daria an angrier and much more confident woman, and Gabriel a deeply troubled man, conscious that nothing will ever feel quite the same again.
There is a kind of equality of unhappiness, at least, among the characters in Emma Rice’s fabulous 2003 version of Tristan and Yseult, briefly at the Lyceum this week. Rice’s legendary Kneehigh production delivers a strongly Cornish 21st century version of the story, set in a neon-lit liminal place called The Club of the Unloved, and peopled by spectacularly unattractive balaclava-and-anorak-wearing types.
This lot of losers are kindly and harmless, though, singing their way through a back-catalogue of familiar love-songs, and morphing into other characters to tell the story of King Mark of Cornwall, who wins a crucial war against the Irish, and sends the valiant young knight Tristan to pick up the late Irish king’s sister Yseult, and bring her back to Cornwall as Mark’s future queen.
Needless to say, on the journey back Tristan and Yseult become passionate lovers, opening the door to whole worlds of heartache, vengeance and redemption through love, conveyed by Rice and her company with a superbly inventive, almost circus-like kinetic force. And In the end, this remarkable show is an ensemble piece for all those whom love has passed by; which perhaps, on a bad day, means every one of us, joining in the sad songs from the audience, and preparing to don our anorak and knitted balaclava, on the day when we finally accept our fate.
Lune at Oran Mor, Glasgow, and Tristan & Yseult at the Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh, both run until 24 October
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