Our Martin in the Background
★★★☆☆ Reflective
Scottish Storytelling Centre (Venue 30a): Sun 17 – Mon 25 Aug 2025
Review by Rebecca Mahar
Billed as “the queer love story Noël Coward didn’t write,” Mark Kydd brings new monodrama Our Martin in the Background for the final week of the Fringe only, on odd afternoons at the Scottish Storytelling Centre.
Our Martin is written and performed by Kydd. Inspired by the David Lean film Brief Encounter, which was itself adapted by Coward from his own earlier play Still Life, Kydd has spun a different story of a chance meeting at a railway station into a saga of unfulfilled love.
Mark Kydde. Pic: Laverne Edmonds.
In Brief Encounter, a man and a woman meet by chance at a station; in Our Martin, two men meet by chance at Carnforth railway station while it’s being used for the shooting of Brief Encounter, in which they are background actors.
This being 1945, it isn’t safe for young Martin and Hugh, his elder by several years and married to a woman, to openly declare their feelings for each other— but as people in such situations often do, they manage to find a way to communicate.
When Carnforth filming wraps up, both are offered jobs on the production for the London shooting, and by contrived coincidence, share lodgings in a boarding house. All seems like it might be happy, until Hugh’s wife writes that she is pregnant.
cleverly framed
It’s a compelling story, cleverly framed within the production of Brief Encounter, which has been posited as an allegory for Coward’s own experiences as a gay man unable to live openly. Kydd’s delivery is genuine, as if Martin is telling the story to a gathered group of friends, simply reminiscing on his past.
This simplicity is one of the show’s strengths, but also one of its weaknesses: performed with Kydd almost exclusively sitting still in a chair and with little differentiation between the different characters of Martin’s story, the conversational style of the piece has a tendency to start to feel repetitive and simply wash over the audience. Crisp and snappy in the style of Noël Coward, it is not.
It is punctuated, though, by many moments of humour (“oh, he’s done it now, I’m picturing him in uniform!”) and heartbreaking drama.“I’m not free to choose,” Kydd implores plaintively, as Hugh, “and I’m not brave enough to leave.”
The through-line of truth, drawing on real situations and believable inventions, gives Our Martin in the Background a beating heart and an aching soul. It reflects painful reality, the joy that can be found within the same, and how chance encounters have a way of coming back around.
Running time: One hour (no interval).
The Scottish Storytelling Centre (George Mackay Brown Library), 43-45 High Street EH1 1SR (Venue 30a).
Sunday 17 – Monday 25 August 2025.
Odd Dates only: 3.45pm.
Tickets and details: Book here on EdFringe.com.
Facebook: @Mark.Kydd.Creative
Mark Kydde. Pic: Laverne Edmonds
ENDS
