Heralding the reopening of Glasgow’s iconic Citizens Theatre, Small Acts Of Love is a charming, if occasionally sentimental, study of the aftermath of the Lockerbie disaster, tracing the lives and connections of both locals and victims’ families. With an unremarkable yet pleasant and eclectic score by Ricky Ross, it uses musical numbers to consolidate the emotional power of the individual stories, weaving towards a finale that suggests community can heal even a huge and public trauma. 

The explosion of a Pan Am flight over Lockerbie in 1988 left emotional scars across the local community and Francis Poet’s script traces the anguish and the redemption. It uses conversations with people who were involved in the immediate aftermath and subsequent transatlantic connections, creating a patchwork of lives well-lived and unexpected loves. 

With an ensemble cast that swap roles with ease and hold the emotive away from the melodramatic, the script roves across various characters and events. It demonstrates how small acts of love by the Lockerbie people (treating the victims’ bodies with respect, cleaning the clothes that had been scattered across the countryside by the explosion, piecing together journals and discovering lost photographs) allowed the families to find some closure. 

Fragments of stories cross over and interweave: the priest battles with his devastation, and presumably his faith, before achieving consolation in those around him; an older Lockerbie resident finds love with the parent of one of those killed; a mother grieves her own child and a victim together in a secret ritual. 

The broad approach focuses on the compassion and the loss experienced, forming a moral meditation on human resilience and how even a catastrophe can foster human solidarity. Refusing to exploit the events for easy tragedy, it is a restrained testament to kindness that appropriately, but inevitably, lacks a powerful dramatic punch.

Small Acts Of Love, reviewed at Citizens Theatre, Glasgow, run ended.