Skip to main content

The Stornoway Way

Brunton Theatre, Musselburgh
Three stars

There can’t be many shows that open with a piece of audience participation that involves a Gaelic masterclass of sorts. This, however, is how Kevin MacNeill sets out his store for his own adaptation of his 2005 novel, currently touring the nation in a series of one-night stands by Matthew Zajac’s Dogstar company in association with the Lewis-based An Lanntair organisation.

It’s one of many leaps both off the page and through the fourth wall taken in Zajac’s production of MacNeill’s yarn, which charts the tragi-comic rake’s progress of busking wannabe Roman Stornoway and his self-destructive attempts to get away from his island home, but which only result in him getting out of it in other ways. With ex-girlfriend Eilidh in tow, Roman lands in the big city with dreams of making a record, but instead falls into a doomed adventure with Hungarian student Eva, with a prodigal’s return seemingly inevitable.

The linguistic flourishes of MacNeill’s script are given flesh and blood by an all-female trio of onstage performers, with Naomi Stirrat going so far as to acknowledge her seeming inappropriateness for the role before going on to be utterly believable as Roman’s boozy everyman in search of the high life and an identity beyond the tedium of the island. With Rachel Kennedy as Eilidh and Chloe-Ann Tylor as Eva also managing to bring an entire community to life on Ali Maclaurin’s washed-out set, songs penned by MacNeill with Willie Campbell and Colin Macleod expand the show’s reach even further against Jim Hope’s video backdrop of crashing waves.    

As the play itself acknowledges, the figure of the roaring boy roistering his way through life has long been a literary cliché. Dragged into contemporary Scotland as it is here, it becomes a damning illustration of a culture willing to embrace such iconography. Roman’s generation too are willing to drown themselves in it if it will only ease the boredom. For Roman, and every lost boy and girl he represents, there are few other choices available in this wild meditation seen through a glass darkly.

The Herald, October 4th 2019

ends


Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Ron Butlin - The Sound of My Voice

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
Post a Comment
Read more

Losing Touch With My Mind - Psychedelia in Britain 1986-1990

DISC 1 1. THE STONE ROSES   -  Don’t Stop 2. SPACEMEN 3   -  Losing Touch With My Mind (Demo) 3. THE MODERN ART   -  Mind Train 4. 14 ICED BEARS   -  Mother Sleep 5. RED CHAIR FADEAWAY  -  Myra 6. BIFF BANG POW!   -  Five Minutes In The Life Of Greenwood Goulding 7. THE STAIRS  -  I Remember A Day 8. THE PRISONERS  -  In From The Cold 9. THE TELESCOPES   -  Everso 10. THE SEERS   -  Psych Out 11. MAGIC MUSHROOM BAND  -  You Can Be My L-S-D 12. THE HONEY SMUGGLERS  - Smokey Ice-Cream 13. THE MOONFLOWERS  -  We Dig Your Earth 14. THE SUGAR BATTLE   -  Colliding Minds 15. GOL GAPPAS   -  Albert Parker 16. PAUL ROLAND  -  In The Opium Den 17. THE THANES  -  Days Go Slowly By 18. THEE HYPNOTICS   -  Justice In Freedom (12" Version) 1. THE STONE ROSES    Don’t Stop ( Silvertone   ORE   1989) The trip didn’t quite start here for what sounds like Waterfall played backwards on The Stone Roses’ era-defining eponymous debut album, but it sounds
Post a Comment
Read more

Edinburgh Rocks – The Capital's Music Scene in the 1950s and Early 1960s

Edinburgh has always been a vintage city. Yet, for youngsters growing up in the shadow of World War Two as well as a pervading air of tight-lipped Calvinism, they were dreich times indeed. The founding of the Edinburgh International Festival in 1947 and the subsequent Fringe it spawned may have livened up the city for a couple of weeks in August as long as you were fans of theatre, opera and classical music, but the pubs still shut early, and on Sundays weren't open at all. But Edinburgh too has always had a flipside beyond such official channels, and, in a twitch-hipped expression of the sort of cultural duality Robert Louis Stevenson recognised in his novel, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, a vibrant dance-hall scene grew up across the city. Audiences flocked to emporiums such as the Cavendish in Tollcross, the Eldorado in Leith, The Plaza in Morningside and, most glamorous of all due to its revolving stage, the Palais in Fountainbridge. Here the likes of Joe Loss and Ted Heath broug
2 comments
Read more