The King’s Kilt

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JOYCE MCMILLAN on THE KING’S KILT at Oran Mor, Glasgow, for The Scotsman 29.11.14.
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3 stars ***

THE ORAN MOR PANTO may not open until next week; but there’s a definite mood of festive jollity about this playful little fantasy by leading Scottish playwright Rona Munro, in which an American academic called Walt Scott, visiting Edinburgh for the first time, finds himself slipping through a time-warp , and into a key moment in the life of his distant ancestor, Sir Walter Scott.

The King’s Kilt is a play of three characters, each with a double existence in the present day, and in the Edinburgh of 1822, on the eve of the historic visit of King George IV.  There’s Walt or Sir Walter, desperately trying to commission a giant kilt for the corpulent monarch on the eve of the visit he has designed to affirm Scotland’s place in the Union, 77 years on from the Jacobite rebellion.  There is Ailsa the gifted seamstress from Skye, reluctant to make any such kilt; and her present-day equivalent, an enterprising seller of tartan tat in the shadow of the Scott Monument.  And there is Walt’s dragon landlady, Miss McEvoy, a descendant of the landlady who gave Walter Scott hell in the Canongate, before he graduated to more congenial premises.

Whether all this amounts to much more than a sustained familiar joke about the origins of modern Scottish tartanism is hard to say; the stereotypes are obvious, the mood light.  Yet given the sheer charm and energy of Marilyn Imrie’s production, the question hardly seems to matter; and the show features three performances –  from  David Mara, Alison Peebles and the gorgeous Beth Marshall –  so delightful that the audience has little option but to roll over, eat up its pies, and enjoy the fun.

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Jeeves & Wooster In Perfect Nonsense

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JOYCE MCMILLAN on JEEVES AND WOOSTER  at the Theatre Royal, Glasgow, for The Scotsman 29.11.14.
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3 stars ***

IT’S ALWAYS A JOY to enter the sunlit world of P.G. Wodehouse, where the worst life has to offer is a dressing-down from a dragon aunt in a country-house drawing-room.  And in this cheerful touring show – subtitled Perfect Nonsense, and loosely based on the classic 1938 Wodehouse story The Code Of The Woosters – there are some additional pleasures to relish, not only in the accomplished presence of John Gordon Sinclair as Jeeves and a startling range of other characters, but in the pleasing meta-theatrical quality of the Goodale Brothers’ adaptation, in which young Bertie learns a lot about how to tell his story to a theatre audience, thanks to Jeeves’s astonishing skill at hammering together a set, and devising a bicycle-powered revolve for the stage.

The story is a lively piece of thistledown involving Aunt Dahlia’s quest for an 18th century silver cow-creamer, and Bertie’s sustained attempt to keep the passionate Madeline Bassett safely engaged to his newt-loving friend Gussie Fink-Nottle, for fear she should switch her affections to him.  And with Robert Goodale himself gracing the cast as Aunt Dahlia and her aged butler Seppings, Joel Sams stepping in magnificently for an indisposed James Lance as Bertie, and John Gordon Sinclair excelling himself as Jeeves, Gussie, the lovely Madeline, and her pert cousin Stephanie, the show emerges as an irresistibly jolly celebration both of Wodehouse himself, and of the power of theatre, celebrated in a glorious final soft-shoe shuffle that has the audience roaring its approval.

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Station Stories

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JOYCE MCMILLAN on STATION STORIES at Queen Street Station, Glasgow, for The Scotsman 29.11.14.
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4 stars ****

IF YOU GO DOWN to the station today – to Glasgow Queen Street right now, or Aberdeen next week, or Edinburgh Waverley the week after – you might experience an odd sense of slipping out of time, as you hurry across the concourse.  Everything is normal, of course – the coffee stalls, the ticket barriers, the trains; except that there, somewhere in the middle, is a little island of strangeness, like a Victorian railway waiting-room peopled by characters in tweeds and whiskers, who invite you to step in – for no charge – and join them on a journey.  There are old leather benches to sit on while you wait, and what look like two ancient cameras on tripods, with black cloths to cover your head as you peer into them; and then you’re off, on four tiny journeys – two in each camera – that transport you to a different world, past, future or imaginary, in which journeys are still the subjects of strange, winding travellers’ tales, and the tracks stretching off into the distance might lead to the ends of the earth.

This is Station Stories, produced by Scotland’s international music and theatre company Cryptic as one of the final events in this year’s Homecoming Festival; and it’s created by the Belgian-born, Glasgow-based artist Sven Werner, whose work explores the idea of magic realism, and uses tiny, meticulously-constructed worlds, combined with narrative and music, to unleash the imagination.  For some months, Werner has been travelling Scotland collecting tales of journeys, and constructing the two tiny installations – an old railway carriage, an old trackside cottage – that form the centrepieces of the visual experience.  And then, lovingly set up on old wind-up gramophone machinery, there are the moving images that flicker past the train windows, the drifting snow across the tracks, the rich transatlantic voice of the nameless narrator, and magnificent, atmospheric music, all exquisitely co-ordinated by Werner.

The result is a tiny experience – just two images, and four stories lasting only three or four minutes each.  Yet the stories themselves are so surreal and melancholy, so completely out of time, that they immediately reach into a deep place in the imagination, beautiful, unsettling, hard to forget.  There’s the yarn about the man travelling with his old, dying dog, the one about the stormy journey to a wedding on Eigg in dinner jacket and red cocktail dress, the one about the trawler; there’s a touch of Jack London, a touch of Sherlock Holmes, even a hint of Alasdair Gray.

And when I had heard my last tale, and emerged from under the black cloth, I found that a strange thing had happened to my perspective on the world; as if the voice of the Queen Street announcer listing the stations to Aberdeen had somehow become thrilling, mysterious, charged with meaning.   Which, I suppose, is exactly how Sven Werner wants to change our relationship with the apparently banal world around us; in a miniature show that may not be labelled as part of the Christmas season, but that shares the same sense of romance and  transforming magic, lying just beneath the surface of our ordinary lives.

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Planning For Panto Time

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JOYCE MCMILLAN: PLANNING FOR PANTO TIME for Scotsman Magazine, 29.11.14.
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THE END OF NOVEMBER approaches, and the great Panto Grid begins to take shape on my desk.  At the moment, there are 22 professional shows scribbled into spaces on the grid, morning, noon and evening; but there could easily be a dozen more, in theatres from Inverness to Ayr, and beyond.  There no denying the colossal scale of the Christmas show phenomenon, as it sweeps through Scotland’s theatres; for some venues, panto sales across three or four weeks, often with more than one performance a day, can represent almost half of their box office income for a year.

So when theatres run into trouble, the Christmas show is always the last production to go, and the first to return.  One particularly happy opening night this year is the gala panto performance at the Byre in St. Andrews, dark since January 2013, and now reopened at last, under university management, with a version of Jack And The Beanstalk created by the Bard In The Botanics company from Glasgow.   Perth Theatre may be closed for refurbishment, but its annual panto appears at Perth Concert Hall, without missing a step.  Theatres that generally don’t produce their own professional shows, like the Brunton in Musselburgh, make an exception for panto.  And when new theatre spaces appear on the scene, like the gorgeous Beacon Arts Centre at Greenock, they use panto to attract audiences and affirm their presence; this year, the Beacon’s boss Julie Ellen directs a new version of Cinderella, by Alan McHugh.

So what does this huge explosion of activity do for theatre in Scotland, apart from providing much-needed income? There’s no doubt that when it comes to panto, the Scottish theatre scene benefits from the relative smallness of its scale, which guarantees close and often productive relationships between Christmas theatre and year-round theatre work.  Most of the new writing-and-performing stars of Scottish Christmas theatre – like Johnny McKnight at the Tron and MacRobert, or Aberdeen super-Dame and ubiquitous panto writer Alan McHugh – move effortlessly between panto and other forms, appearing regularly as writers, actors and directors in other shows.   Play, Pie And Pint at Oran Mor slides smoothly from its normal lunchtime programme into two political pantos a year; this season’s offering, by David Anderson, is a new take on the Emperor’s New Clothes.  The scene offers a huge range of Christmas entertainment, from full-scale traditional pantos, through satirical meta-pantos for grown-ups at the Tron and Oran Mor, to a straight Christmas musical in Pitlochry, which this year presents Miracle On 34th Street, and two major Roald Dahl children’s shows at Dundee and the Royal Lyceum.  And in recent years, there has been a huge growth in smaller shows for much smaller people, at the MacRobert, the Tron, the Arches, the Traverse, the Platform in Glasgow, and North Edinburgh Arts Centre.

If there is a concern around the Scottish Christmas scene at the moment, it might lie in a decline of the commissioning of contemporary Scottish-based writers to create new mainstage children’s shows.  For the moment, theatres like the Citizens’, the Lyceum and Dundee seem to be relying on existing versions of stories like James And The Giant Peach, The BFG and Dickens’s Christmas Carol, which appears at the Citizens’ this year; and the rising generation of writers feature mainly in shows for tiny tots.

Yet with many hundreds of performers, choreographers, designers, lighting artists, musicians, technicians and stage managers hard at work in Scotland’s theatres at this moment, putting together a season of entertainment that draws audiences to it on a scale – and with a social reach – still unrivalled at other times of year, it’s hard to see Scotland’s panto scene as anything other than an explosion of rude health; although which shows will hit the creative heights this year, and which will only do the mimimum to keep the income rolling in – well, that remains to be seen, as I head out on the long panto trail, over the next few weeks.

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