“Hilarious and Heartwarming – Without Ever Pulling Its Punches”
Dancing Shoes isn’t quite the play you might expect from its title. The words ‘dancing shoes’ suggest something light and playfully funny, and certainly not a story about addiction, recovery, and above all, loneliness. Dancing Shoes manages to be all of these things and more.
The play starts with three characters who we find all midway through their own particular stories. All addicts who meet at a recovery meeting in a community centre, each of them at some point tries to give his backstory and is shut down. There is no exploration of why or how these men became addicts, what their lives were like during their period of addiction, and especially not what their lives were like before. Rather than diminishing the characters this refusal of elaboration only serves to give them even more depth.
We meet Craig, Donny, and Jay as we would meet anyone. They are complete people with complete lives that happened entirely before we knew them. This clearly informs their every action and most importantly their every reaction. Constantly these men say or do something that comes across as bizarre, or paranoid, or reckless, and you understand—like you would with anyone—that it’s a reaction coming from some other place and some other trauma, though what exactly that is, you’ll never know.
It makes it so easy to really grow to love these characters, flaws and all. Over the course of the hour as they become friends with each other, it starts to feel as if you’re becoming friends with them as well.
The way Dancing Shoes navigates friendship is similarly hidden behind subtext and odd sentiments. One of the most heartwarming and affirming aspects of the play is what it has to say about how difficult it is to make friends as an adult and how the hardness of Scottish culture rejects acts of love and kindness between friends. It’s hard to find almost anything that can truly be said to tackle these issues, let alone with as much pathos and care as Dancing Shoes does.
More openly, Dancing Shoes is about recovery. Recovery from addiction but also recovery from isolation and arguments and anxiety. It weaves between these ideas and themes with adept grace, knowing exactly when to hit every beat that it has to.
Most impressive of all, Dancing Shoes manages all of this without ever feeling very heavy. The excellent comedic timing and the tongue-in-cheek fourth-wall breaks make the play skate by without ever getting bogged down in anything overly-sentimental or unearned.
This is of course due in large part to the all around excellent cast. Lee Harris in particular delivers a stand-out performance as Craig, perfectly capturing the subtleties of his character which make him the heart of the show. Stephen Docherty also shines as Donny, bringing a physicality to him that makes him so endearing and rootable while also being completely believable. Donny feels at once like a fantastical joke and a kindly man who you might meet in the streets, or at a community centre. It would be wrong to not also mention Craig McLean, whose comedic talent completely shines through his role as Jay.
Simply put, Dancing Shoes knows exactly what it wants to be and exactly what it should be, and it meets every criteria it sets out perfectly.