Writer and Director: Aidan Monks
Almost six years since the pandemic began, it’s pretty rare to see a lockdown-based play these days. Partly because theatres exhausted the topic at the time, and now it somehow feels both too far away and too soon, the St Andrews Art Theatre company’s decision to present a new pandemic-focused play about ‘plague raves’ and the complexities of two former school friends isolating together is a bold one. One / Another by Aidan Monks is presented at the Etcetera Theatre as four work-in-progress performances staged with scripts in hand and perhaps too many ideas that still need to be refined.
Dog offers estranged school friend Monk a place to stay when a national lockdown is declared in 2020, and with both their mums distracted or absent, the young men are left alone to reconnect. Now a music journalist, Dog is more conscious of the pandemic restrictions, while Monk is keen to attend illegal parties in defiance of the law. As they rake over old ground, the year that follows is full of connection and conflict.
Monks has written a slippery 70-minute drama that cuts back and forth in time, leaving the audience sometimes confused about where we are in the story. It’s clearer when scenes spool back to pre-2020, and the reasons the boys (played by Dylan Swain and Aubrey McCance) fell out in the first place, but the shape of their lockdown experience is deliberately but not always explicably jumbled.
One of the things we all remember most about that period is the very clear timeline, and while the days may have merged, the trajectory from uncertainty and panic, to vaccine development, government parties, and slowly changing restrictions would provide a clearer architecture for One / Another, bringing together and better articulating the mix of short scenes, longer conversations and memories. Although on a point of order, Tiger King was over by Christmas 2020, and everyone was talking about Bridgerton.
The central dilemma is also a bit lost without this structure, so whether the play is endorsing or judging those who went to the raves is not always clear when both men participate but also argue about them. It would help to build out the characterisation of both Dog and Monk to understand more about their moral perspective in relation to those same pandemic restrictions; is Monk a renegade always, who defies convention, or a nice lad swept up in the wrong crowd? Likewise, is Dog fundamentally opposed to wrongdoing of any kind, and how does that play out when he also breaks the law? And that would also help to better substantiate the attraction that ebbs and flows between them.
In staging One / Another, the flow could be improved with a Jamie Lloyd trick that avoids multiple blackouts and slips between scenes, times and locations with lighting cues or a breath instead. There is also a mirror on stage (for no reason in this case), which needs to be reangled so the reflected spotlights don’t blind the audience and make it hard to see half the play from the back row.
There is a lot here, but less is always more: fewer plot points, fewer digressions like the random sex hotline the men both call that adds little, and a tighter narrative trajectory that can explore all the excellent themes, including loneliness, feeling restricted in all senses and the bond that music gives them. For now, Monks has written a series of moods, but what the audience needs to see is how lockdown and this friendship eventually changed them.
Runs Until 28 January 2026
