Skip to main content

Oor Wullie

Dundee Rep
Four stars

Icons don’t come much bigger in this country than Oor Wullie. The spiky-topped tearaway and his bucket-wielding antics in small-town Auchenshoogle have made generations of comic strip readers part of Wullie’s gang ever since he was first created by Dudley D. Watkins in 1936. That sense of inclusion pervades this bold stage adaptation by writer and lyricist Scott Gilmour and composer Claire McKenzie, the internationally successful musical theatre duo behind the Noisemaker company, who have joined forces with Dundee Rep and Selladoor Productions to allow Wullie to make the leap from page to stage.

Andrew Panton’s production enables this by way of a set-up where Eklovey Kashyap’s disaffected real world schoolboy Wahid, on the run from everyday racism in the classroom, is loaned an Oor Wullie annual by a mysterious librarian called Dudley. Through this portal comes Wullie himself, played by Martin Quinn as a gallus Peter Pan-like sprite in search of his stolen bucket. From this jumping off point, Wullie and Wahid embark on an awfully big adventure in a construction that draws from teen movie angst, with all the explorations of belonging, social cliques and the urge to stay forever young that goes with the genre.

With George Drennan regaling the audience with rhyming couplets as Dudley, Wullie and co become a kind of Scooby gang who land in an episode of Glee soundtracked by the sort of infectiously raucous Caledonian-tinged pop designed to rouse nations. There is also a scene-stealing gospel routine to treasure care of Ann Louise Ross as PC Murdoch and Irene Macdougall’s smitten teacher.

Gilmour’s patter-rich dialogue is shot through with a fruitily baroque swagger that creates a demotic all its own. As Panton’s cast of ten stride through the sliding doors and rubbish bins of Kenneth Macleod’s set, the play’s family friendly treatise on friendship, belonging and strength through unity is as good a festive message as any in a show that brings knowingness and depth to a classic cartoon hero.

The Herald, December 2nd 2019

Ends



Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

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) ...
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

Carla Lane – The Liver Birds, Mersey Beat and Counter Cultural Performance Poetry

Last week's sad passing of TV sit-com writer Carla Lane aged 87 marks another nail in the coffin of what many regard as a golden era of TV comedy. It was an era rooted in overly-bright living room sets where everyday plays for today were acted out in front of a live audience in a way that happens differently today. If Lane had been starting out now, chances are that the middlebrow melancholy of Butterflies, in which over four series between 1978 and 1983, Wendy Craig's suburban housewife Ria flirted with the idea of committing adultery with successful businessman Leonard, would have been filmed without a laughter track and billed as a dramady. Lane's finest half-hour highlighted a confused, quietly desperate and utterly British response to the new freedoms afforded women over the previous decade as they trickled down the class system in the most genteel of ways. This may have been drawn from Lane's own not-quite free-spirited quest for adventure as she moved through h...
Post a Comment
Read more