Someone’s Knockin’ at the Door review – in search of Macca’s Mull of Kintyre hideaway

. UK edition

Jonathan Watson and Maureen Carr in Someone’s Knockin’ at the Door.
Comic mileage … Jonathan Watson and Maureen Carr in Someone’s Knockin’ at the Door. Photograph: Tommy Ga-Ken Wan

An anecdote about a trip to find Paul McCartney’s Scottish retreat turns into a sweet-natured two-hander

Milly Sweeney is a young writer gaining traction. Staged in Pitlochry last year, her play Water Colour, about the changing states of mind of two Glaswegians, earned her the Stage debut award for best writer. Here, she kicks off the lunchtime spring season of A Play, a Pie and a Pint with a sweet-natured two-hander that turns a family anecdote into a quiet study of love, ambition and the pain of growing apart.

It is about Jack and Kathy, who log in separately to online chats with their granddaughter to help with a school assignment about “untold Scottish stories”. They have a particularly good one: on a holiday to Campbeltown in the hot summer of 1976, they made an impromptu attempt to find Paul McCartney’s rural retreat.

Sweeney gets good comic mileage from the discrepancies in their accounts, neither seeing things quite from the other’s perspective, however fateful the trip turns out to be for both of them. Their history is both shared and divergent.

In Sally Reid’s production, Maureen Carr and Jonathan Watson play the grandparents with the wisdom of age, looking back without rancour at a mismatched couple flung together after a shotgun wedding and figuring out too late what they want from life.

Jack’s obsession with the Fab Four goes beyond their songs. “If I could meet a Beatle in the flesh, I could do anything I set my mind to,” he says. The band’s artistic achievement fuels his own ambition, while their progress from friendship to acrimony mirrors the state of his marriage. Kathy is less obsessed, but sees their growing apart as an inevitable consequence of maturing.

If some of the historical details feel shoehorned in and if the story, inspired by real events, sometimes feels more anecdotal than dramatic, Someone’s Knockin’ at the Door nonetheless takes an amusing route across the Mull of Kintyre to reach its touching destination.

• At Òran Mór, Glasgow, until 28 February. Then touring until 22 March.