Man’s Best Friend review – lockdown, loneliness and a pack of cute canines

7 hours ago 1

A few blocks down the road on Argyle Street, a stall is promoting conspiracy theories about AstraZeneca. Every side is pasted with neurotic headlines misinforming passersby about vaccines. It is an odd, not to mention dangerous, throwback to the pandemic.

So, too, in its own benign way, is Douglas Maxwell’s play. It is not just that Man’s Best Friend concerns a lockdown-era bereavement, a hospital stay in isolation and a funeral on Zoom. It is also that its themes are steeped in those strange months when it felt we had been plucked out of time. Maxwell evokes the days when past and future were denied us.

There is clapping for the NHS, a new moment of neighbourliness and an urge to yell out the names of those we have lost. More than that, there is a sense of rootlessness and irresolution. A world in limbo.

It is apparent from the start that something is awry with Ronnie. Performed with storytelling panache by Jordan Young, he is a man who cannot settle. Despite a cheery disposition, an invigorating job as a dog walker and a satirical eye for the rituals of outdoor life, he is out of sorts. He is not yet an emergency case (he has based his Zen meditation techniques on an advert for Center Parcs), but nor is he at ease.

Thus, he walks with Albert, Fury, Carlos, Coriander and Rex around the embracing curves of Becky Minto’s plank-lined set, as Grant Anderson’s lighting shifts from pale dawn to fiery dusk, Ross Collins’s cute canine illustrations come and go, and Maxwell’s monologue grows from lighthearted to maudlin. Beyond the easy comedy, it is a play stalked by death and a yearning for release.

First seen in 2022 in the lunchtime series A Play, a Pie and a Pint and now restaged by Jemima Levick in a handsome 80-minute production, it is vivid and touching. But it is also not quite of this time. For all Maxwell’s perceptivity about loneliness, loss and dogs, and for all Young’s vulnerability and charm, the world of Man’s Best Friend is neither close enough nor far away enough to hit where it hurts.