“Inexperience” at Pitlochry Festival Theatre
Mark Brown in Highland Perthshire
★★★★☆
2 July 2026
Scottish dramatist Douglas Maxwell has enjoyed some notable highs, and occasional, difficult lows, in the course of his 26-year career. His early play Decky Does a Bronco (2000) – a sensitive and powerful contemplation of the impact of a brutal incidence of child abuse – brought him deserved plaudits.
Adura Onashile and Sandy Grierson.
Photo credit: Tommy Ga-Ken Wan.
Since then, a series of well-received stage dramas – such as If Destroyed True (2005), Mancub (2005), A Respectable Widow Takes to Vulgarity (2012) and Man’s Best Friend (2022) – has confirmed his reputation as one of Scotland’s finest playwrights.
Maxwell’s most notable failures – the palpably undercooked Variety (at the Edinburgh International Festival in 2002) and the overwrought Fever Dream: Southside (Citizens Theatre, Glasgow, 2015) – were, unfortunately for him, high profile ones. They will have burned the author. Like any stage production, a theatre premiere that misfires is a collective effort, but it is the writer who is the primary recipient of the brickbats.
However, undeterred by occasional adversity, Maxwell has remained remarkably productive. Indeed, he has, in recent years, reconfirmed his status as one of Caledonian drama’s most perceptive, poetic, humorous and humane voices.
Excellent works The Sheriff of Kalamaki and So Young brought the writer the Best New Play prizes at the Critics’ Awards for Theatre in Scotland in 2024 and 2025, respectively. His latest piece, Inexperience – a play about the complexities of youth, desire and the passage of time (among other matters) – continues that strong run of form.
Sandy Grierson and Sophie Fortune.
Photo credit: Tommy Ga-Ken Wan.
Playing in the splendid studio space at Pitlochry Festival Theatre – where the acclaimed Scottish actor Alan Cumming is currently staging his first season as artistic director – the play boasts an impressive cast and (in Sally Reid) a fine director. The play begins in 1995 in the palatial house owned by the parents of university student Iris (Sophie Fortune) who is celebrating her 21st birthday.
There, in a state of, by turns, philosophical and flirtatious drunkenness, she unintentionally changes the life of her charmingly diffident fellow student Robin (Alexander Tait). The soon-to-be-established premise of the play is that – in order to maintain the sensual “charge” between them – the pair enter into a pact whereby, should they ever touch, they must undertake to never see each other again.
It is a smart conceit, achieving, as it does, an intriguing balance between youthful idealism and a more profound sense of how fleeting human desires can be. Fortune and Tait generate a sound basis for the drama to come with energy, humour and empathy.
Maxwell’s play then zips forward to Glasgow Sheriff Court in the present day, where Iris (whose memory of Robin is flaky, to put it mildly) is, unexpectedly, reunited with her former student friend, who is now chief clerk to the court. Played by the outstanding actors Adura Onashile and Sandy Grierson, the middle-aged duo are now mentors to (in Iris’s case) young climate activist Toni (played by Fortune) and (on Robin’s part) earnest court trainee Arthur (Tait).
The unfolding, parallel narratives alight insightfully, sometimes comically, often affectingly on the richly varied impacts of life experience and the hopes of youth. A sharp, pungent Mametesque sub-plot – in which Robin stumbles, relatively innocently, but unadvisedly, into dangerous workplace politics – could have been a full-length play of its own.
The play carries the humanism, humour and courageous nettle-grasping that we have come to expect of Maxwell. Reid directs with intelligence and palpable empathy, getting the kind of nuanced, well-rounded performances one would expect of Onashile and Grierson, and strong, versatile playing from young actors Fortune and Tait.
Jessica Worrall’s designs (which are both attractive and functional) and Derek Anderson’s (always smartly responsive) lighting complete an industrious, quietly accomplished production of yet another nicely crafted Maxwell play.
Until 4 July: pitlochryfestivaltheatre.com
