Morrison’s pursuer is joined on the way by a dog named Dionysus, after the Greek deity of wine, theatre and all things fun (“Please remember to feed the god” she is reminded).īut life on the road, for both of them, has already been one of Dionysian pleasures and misfit torments of polyamorous encounters, fitful first gigs, fluke hit singles and a rioting audience – with the feeling that they are whirling agents of damage, hurting anyone they encounter. If the quest recalls Orpheus and Eurydice, another duo synonymous with song, a painful split and a difficult comeback tour, those bells are lightly rung. She begins to retrace their footsteps, in the hope of somehow retrieving him, from the moment she interrupted this moderately famous pop star’s suicide attempt, in a faceless Scottish hotel, through their time touring the pubs of Britain as a fledgling musical duo. Even as she describes his funeral, for another young singer who disappeared and was never found, she is unable to let him go. Her second-person address identifies them only as “me” and “you”, to which Fink sometimes answers, as though they were eternally intertwined. In the Old Vic’s production, the play comes in hot pursuit of the music: Rona Morrison, our more earthbound narrator, arrives to the small bare stage with an accusatory vigour, directed at her absent partner. It’s a fitting association: two magnetically attractive troubadours, both of them fascinatingly aloof. Cover My Tracks, a clever and delicate collaboration between musician Charlie Fink and writer David Greig, is a short performance about a hard act to follow.Ī play with songs (or vice versa) it begins with Fink, the former frontman of the band Noah and the Whale, sitting onstage in the gentle delivery of a song about the end of a relationship – either romantic or artistic – in a voice that recalls early Bob Dylan and Lou Reed.