The Information on: `Riddance'

What Is It?

Paines Plough presents the world premiere of Scottish playwright Linda McLean's chilling emotional thriller, directed by Vicky Featherstone. It involves a vacuum-cleaner salesman, a woman who has given away her child, and a mutual friend from their childhood in a Glasgow tenement.

Who's In it?

The interlinked trio of characters - Kenny, Clare and Frank - is strikingly portrayed by Lewis Howden, Carolyn Bonnyman and Neil McKinven, who is eerily convincing as the maniacal Frank.

What They Say About It

"Vicky Featherstone consistently allows us to feel the emotional consequences of every step her characters take. If she doesn't quite manage to dramatise the bigger picture, her eye for the dramatic consequences of individual lives makes Riddance an intriguing and promising debut," David Benedict, The Independent.

"I ended up feeling a more intense production than Vicky Featherstone's would have had me more involved in the play's not-exactly-new theme, the difficulty of shedding a foul, clinging past," Benedict Nightingale, The Times.

Where You Can See It

Riddance is at the Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh (0131-228 1404) to 4 Sept