Contact Review – Jonny Donahoe's Bitter Family Two-Hander Simmers at Òran Mór

Jonny Donahoe's new play "Contact," running at Òran Mór in Glasgow, puts two performers through a bitter, closely wound confrontation between a mother and her adult son.

Blythe Duff and Mark Barrett star as Mother and Son, reuniting after an eight-month gap following the arrival of the son's first child. The production uses that reunion, staged around a bonfire of family photographs, to explore how the arrival of a baby reshapes family roles: children become parents, parents become grandparents, and responsibility shifts down a generation.

Duff plays Mother with a spiky indifference toward her son's reappearance, while Barrett's Son navigates the emotional terrain of trying to reconnect with a parent who keeps him at arm's length. The two-hander format puts the full weight of the drama on the performers, and both are praised for sustaining the tension between two characters who stay tightly, almost inescapably, tied to one another.

A compact, intense staging

Donahoe's script is structured as a tightly wound confrontation rather than a sprawling family saga, concentrating the drama into a single extended encounter. The bonfire of photographs becomes a central device, giving the characters a tangible way to revisit shared history as the conversation between them grows more heated.

The production is staged at Òran Mór in Glasgow, a venue known for its lunchtime theatre programming of new Scottish work.