Reviewed by Ewart Shaw, Saturday 12th July 2025.
Almost, Maine is so called because the locals couldn’t get their act together to form a community. Stirling, however, is home to the Stirling Players, who have done a fine job telling the stories of a motley group of Mainelanders, falling in and out of love. This is the achievement of a community that has got its act together. Ben Proeve, in his amateur directorial debut, is very much on his home ground. Playwright, John Cariani, has done a fine job setting the ins and outs of love, in an environment that could be almost anywhere and everywhere at one time.
It’s not a play, if a play is an extended narrative. It’s a series of sketches, like a uni review, but laced with humour, wit, and compassion. Oh yes, it’s surreal and absurd, bizarre, but there’s more than enough warmth to take the edge off midwinter temperatures in the Hills.
The setting is simple. The red bench sits on a blanket of snow. At one point, a door is wheeled on. The cast are dressed for a northern winter. The panorama spreads from the stage out onto the walls.
The prologue and the epilogue take place on that bench. Annabel McGregor suggests to Sam Ewart that she would like to get closer. He comes up with a curious and effective way of managing an embarrassing moment. If she takes a path that circumnavigates the globe, then, as she follows that path, she is paradoxically getting closer to him by leaving. She makes it back at the end. Elsewhere, a young woman wants to give back all the love she received from her man. She carries it on stage in laundry bags appliquéd with big red hearts. A woman turns up on the doorstep of the man who proposed. She wanted to take time to reply, but it’s been twenty years, and he’s married. It is so poignant. There’s even room for a same sex relationship. The young man admits that he has fallen in love with his mate, and fall he does, flopping around like a fish. Then his mate loses his footing and falls for him. I was touched.
Every sketch is applauded heartily. An old friend, by chance at the matinee, was annoyed by the applause at the end of each scene. She wanted to absorb each moment. Each scene, each set-up, explored such subtlety in human beings, and the way they relate, that applause was merited. Add friends and country folk: Tim Stoeckel, Kaila Barton, Oliver Medwell, Harri Wolff, and Kodi Jackson, each of them relishing every word, every silly moment, and every touch of tenderness.
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