On Some Far Shore – Greenside ★★★

For emerging theatre-makers, there is often an expectation that every project must be everything at once. Commercial but artistic. Personal but universal. Experimental but accessible. The result can sometimes be work that feels caught between ambition and caution, one foot on the shore and the other already pushing towards deeper waters. On Some Far Shore, a new musical by Louis Benneyworth for Cross Keys Productions, occasionally finds itself suspended in that tide. Yet it also reveals an emerging writer with a genuine gift for character and an interesting voice worth watching. Set on the eve of his mother’s funeral, Euan sits attempting to write a eulogy that never seems quite capable of capturing the woman he has lost. As Thomas Perry’s quietly anxious Euan pieces together memories with his partner Isla, played by Katie Gill, stories drift in and out like fragments washed ashore by memory. The material explores grief, memory and storytelling, asking how we make sense of the people…