‘We’re seeing other people – at least that’s what we say we are doing,” goes the refrain of the second track on Belle and Sebastian’s dreamy 1996 album If You’re Feeling Sinister. It is about friends who are “kissing just for practice”, claiming to want nothing more than to cuddle, but is laden with uncertainty. They promise not to get in a muddle, but we don’t believe them.
Although it crops up somewhere in the middle of Eve Nichol’s eccentric play with songs, Seeing Other People might easily have been her starting point. Finding themselves somewhere between Willy Russell’s Educating Rita and David Greig’s Midsummer, her central characters, Kid and Boss, have a pupil-teacher relationship that’s uncommonly intense, even as it falls short of romantic. The whole play is troubled by the fuzzy limits of their affair.
If that’s odd enough for a musical – a form not given to ambiguity – so too is the premise that has brought them together. They might not be lovers, but they are partners in crime. For reasons we never fully discover – something to do with a game of make-believe – they have stolen Glasgow’s favourite painting, Salvador Dalí’s Christ of Saint John of the Cross, from Kelvingrove gallery. Now, they have it rolled up in an artist’s storage tube.
The presence of this piece of iconography in their midst gives some justification to religiously themed songs such as the title track, but if you thought Belle and Sebastian would make an awkward fit for the stage, you wouldn’t be entirely wrong. Many of Stuart Murdoch’s songs are stories in themselves, and few do anything to move the plot along. “Why is the man singing about a fox in the snow?” we wonder, pleasing though it is to hear the song of the same name.
But if we’re left guessing about the motivations and objectives of the characters, we’re on firm ground, in Paul Brotherston’s production, with the actors. Alan McHugh and Sarah Swire play punchily across the generation divide, singing the songs sweetly and proving themselves accomplished stars of track and field.
• At Gilded Balloon, Edinburgh, until 26 August.
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