This Is A Gift
★★★★★ Luminous
Pitlochry Festival Theatre: Tue 24 June – Th 11 Sept 2025
Review by Rebecca Mahar
This Is A Gift, Kolbrún Björt Sigfúsdóttir’s Leith-based retelling of the Midas myth performed solo by Blythe Jandoo, creeps into your heart and slowly squeezes it in a golden vice.
This is a feat of writing and storytelling that reminds us that myths don’t always have a happy ending — and shouldn’t. It runs in the PFT Studio for five performances only, with two matinees remaining on Fri 5 and Thurs 11 September 2025.
Blythe Jandoo in This is a Gift. Pic: Tommy Ga-Ken Wan.
Rather than focussing on Midas himself, Kolbrún’s version of the tale puts his daughter Zoë at its centre, a working-class school leaver bound for university.
When Zoë renders aid to the stranger Sylvain, found worse for wear in their garden after a night out, she and her father become connected to Sylvain’s associate and mentor, the enigmatic Dennis, who offers Zoë’s father whatever he could wish for in exchange for taking care of Sylvain.
Midas jokingly says it would be great if everything he touched turned to gold — half reference to his gilding business, half desire to provide a better life. And Dennis takes him at his word. With a gripping of Midas’s shoulders, he proclaims “may it bring you happiness”, and is gone in a flood of golden light and an endless stream of dust falling from overhead.
everyday turmoils
From there the story proceeds along familiar ground: everything Midas touches does turn to gold. The pitfalls of such a gift quickly become evident, and are filtered through the perspective of Zoë. The first to see that the gift is a curse, she struggles to find a way forward under these new circumstances while still living through the everyday turmoils of teenage life.
Blythe Jandoo in This is a Gift. Pic: Tommy Ga-Ken Wan
Jandoo’s performance is an outstanding example of monodramatic storytelling, skilfully weaving the threads of the myth from her character’s hindsight perspective, while keeping the narrative immediate and real.
She fleshes out each of the characters through Zoë’s perception of them, delivering an echo rather than attempting a full embodiment, perfectly pitched to the tone of the story. Jandoo’s ability to navigate, build, and sustain Zoë’s emotional arc through the entirety of the piece is exceptional and devastating.
Kolbrún’s script carefully balances the detail of its story with the need to not make Zoë omniscient, even in hindsight; there are enigmas in the tale and questions that never go answered. These compliment and enrich the story rather than detracting from it, cleaving closely to its mythological roots and the mystery inherent in human encounters with beings whose nature is beyond our ken.
familiar context
Basing the play in Leith, Kolbrún translates the myth into a context more familiar than the original. It’s easy to forget that when many such myths originated, they were in this kind of familiar context to the people who would have heard them.
Blythe Jandoo in This is a Gift. Pic: Tommy Ga-Ken Wan
Kolbrún has skilfully brought the Midas myth into today’s world in a way that feels believable and real. She also comments plainly on the class divides still inherent in our times: when Midas is not a king but a working-class man, when Zoë’s school friends include a New Town heiress who is supportive but clueless, and when Leith is a jumble of gentrification and graft, while wealth “comes gliding in on the tram”.
The sound of the tram is one of the iconic noises in Niroshini Thambar’s subtle and effective sound design, fleshing out the world of the play. Amidst these sounds, Jandoo darts around the golden angles of Naralie Fern’s set, a sloping square interrupted by a circle embedded in one corner, defining the locations of the play be where she pauses to speak and how she transitions between its sides and corners.
striking image
The stream of gold dust that falls from the ceiling is a striking image, if slightly inconsistent in when it stops and starts. This is easily forgiven for its impact, which is outshone only by later whirlwinds of paper butterflies.
Peter Fennell’s lighting design is an essential component of the play’s impact. Subtle shifts indicate changes in time or location. These are both appropriate and serve to emphasis the moments when it bursts its blinding floods of gold, pale ecstasy, or the dark shadows of despair.
Under the bold direction of Sam Hardie, This Is A Gift has taken an old story and given it new life: a myth for the modern day, solid and ephemeral at once, a reminder that humans have not changed all that much since the days of Midas.
Running time: One hour and 20 minutes (no interval).
Pitlochry Festival Theatre, Port-na-Craig, Pitlochry PH16 5DR
Tuesday 24 June – Thursday 11 September 2025
Evenings 8pm (June 24 & 25); Matinees 2:30pm (June 28; July 3; Sept 5, Sept 11)
Tickets and details: Book here.
Blythe Jandoo in This is a Gift. Pic: Tommy Ga-Ken Wan
ENDS
