Written by Tony and Olivier nominated Jonny Donahoe and directed by Ben Standish, Associate Director of A Play, A Pie, And A Pint at Traverse Theatre, Contact is a masterful portrayal of familial love caught up in a tangle of inter-generational trauma and conflict. Every aspect is expertly crafted, from the phenomenal performances to the high impact design.
A son visits his mother. She’s standing in her garden lighting a bonfire, burning papers, she says. During their first interaction in what ‘must have been four, five, eight months’, the pair are almost always five feet apart, their eyes never meet; they move like two magnets of the same pole, completely incapable of connection. Son tells his mother he’s having a kid, dumbfounded she retorts “are you sure?… and you don’t want to adopt?”. He gives her an ultimatum; they must repair their relationship in the next six months, before the baby is born, or else he’ll cut ties with her completely. In the first five minutes the script succinctly epitomises the core motivations and fears of the protagonists with a subtlety and ease that many writers only wish they could achieve.
Blythe Duff is sarcastic, witty, and charming in her role as the emotionally avoidant mother, a character both written and performed with compelling complexity. Where mothers are so often portrayed as unrelentingly selfless caregivers, Contact presents the image of a woman worn down by the intense pressures of motherhood, broken by an abusive husband and the foreboding fear of the ‘shared gene pool’ between him and her son. A woman so scarred by the pressure to protect, care, and nurture that she neglected herself instead. She is hauntingly beautiful, and all too familiar.
While the mother blurts sarcastic retorts in deflection of truths, her son is nervous in her presence, twitching at every changing intonation. Mark Barrett plays the role of the son with heart wrenching vulnerability, a man who stands before his mother and begs that she might end her cycle of emotional neglect. A father-to-be desperately trying to carve out the life for his son that he never had himself, a future filled with big family gatherings, laughter, and community. You’ll feel him hanging onto his mother’s every word and see the tears brimming in his eyes when she twists the knife in his gut in a way only mothers can.
For most of the play, the set is a roll of vivid green Astroturf strewn across the stage with nothing but a metal incinerator glowing orange from within and a rectangle of blue-sky wallpaper pasted on the back wall. The warm glow of embers sits amongst this nostalgic reference to a windows screensaver, the turn of the new millennia, as mother attempts to admonish herself of memories ‘like a rebirth’ and son clings to what remains of their connection, a constant push-pull between generations.
The lighting design sets scenes with a harsh white wash exposing every intimate expression and moment of tension, whilst scene changes fade into a beautiful deep blue juxtaposition of the ever-burning orange embers within the incinerator. The sound design is equally beautiful, adding a surreal layer to each transition while the beautiful end scene, a flashback to mother and son cooking dinner together, is accompanied by Mariah Carey’s Always Be My Baby. This ballad dims with the lights, leaving the audience with the lasting memory of the love embedded underneath all the pain, the love that will remain beyond all the rest, no matter how hard they try to forget.
Contact is showing at Paisley Town Hall from Oct 20th-23rd, tickets can be found at https://www.paisleytownhall.org/whats-on/a-play-a-pie-and-a-pint-contact/
Reviewer: Ella Beckley
Reviewed: 15th October 2026
Theatre Muse UK Rating: *****
