When David MacLennan founded A Play, A Pie and A Pint at Oran Mor in 2004, his first season of lunchtime plays with refreshments included in the ticket price was a modest affair. Eight years on, and having presented some 250 new works, as MacLennan gets set to receive the Critics Awards for Theatre in Scotland's inaugural CATS Whiskers award for Outstanding Achievement, A Play, A Pie and A Pint now looks like a genuine theatrical phenomenon that was seriously ahead of the game. With initial seasons seemingly pulled together with the help of MacLennan's extensive address book of Scottish theatre movers and shakers, it was as if those seemingly left in the theatrical wilderness after grants for companies such as the MacLennan-led Wildcat company had been cut had suddenly rediscovered their mojo. With no tradition of lunchtime theatre in Scotland, A Play, A Pie and A Pint served up works from veteran writers such as Peter MacDougall that were more serious than the sort of froth one might expect from such a forum. Actors such as David Hayman and Robbie Coltrane took to the stage for the first time in years. Pretty soon, writers such as David Greig, David Harrower, Jo Clifford, Morna Pearson and many others grew ever bolder in form and content in what had become a low-risk showcase for writers to explore short-form playwriting with often startling results. Connections were forged, first with Bewley's Lunchtime Theatre in Dublin, then with the Traverse, the National Theatre of Scotland and others. Many plays at Oran Mor have found second or third lives, and the Play, Pie and A Pint web is now far-reaching, with the current One Day in Spring mini-season of middle eastern writers the perfect example of how ambitious the work has become. All this without a penny of direct public funding. When A Play, A Pie and A Pint began, the recession had yet to hit arts funding. Now, with theatre companies forced to be creative with limited budgets, MacLennan and co look like pioneers. With Creative Scotland's review of how it funds major arts companies currently causing justifiable anger among the artists Creative Scotland serves, A Play, A Pie and A Pint is a glaring example of how artist-led initiatives can thrive in difficult times. Watch and learn, Creative Scotland, because A Play, A Pie and A Pint really is the CATS Whiskers. Critics Awards For Theatre in Scotland, Tron Theatre, Glasgow, Sunday June 10th, 3pm The Herald, June 4th 2012 ends
When Ron Butlin saw a man who’d just asked him the time throw himself under a train on the Paris Metro, it was a turning point in how his 1987 novel, The Sound Of My Voice, would turn out. Twenty years on, Butlin’s tale of suburban family man Morris Magellan’s existential crisis and his subsequent slide into alcoholism is regarded as a lost classic. Prime material, then, for the very intimate stage adaptation which opens in the Citizens Theatre’s tiny Stalls Studio tonight. “I had this friend in London who was an alcoholic,” Butlin recalls. “He would go off to work in the civil service in the morning looking absolutely immaculate. Then at night we’d meet, and he’s get mega-blootered, then go home and continue drinking and end up in a really bad state. I remember staying over one night, and he’d emerge from his room looking immaculate again. There was this huge contrast between what was going on outside and what was going on inside.” We’re sitting in a café on Edinburgh’s south sid
Comments