Skip to main content

The Beaches of St Valery

Oran Mor, Glasgow
Four stars

Prime Ministers telling very public lies in order to save their own skin isn’t a recent phenomenon. As this revival of Stuart Hepburn’s Second World War play first seen at Oran Mor’s A Play, a Pie and a Pint lunchtime theatre initiative in 2017 makes clear, when Winston Churchill announced the so-called ‘miracle of Dunkirk’ that saw 350,000 British troops evacuated to safety, he wasn’t quite telling the whole story. In fact, he had cut a deal that saw the men of the 51st Highland Division hung out to dry as collateral damage on the frontline, where 9,000 of them were forced to surrender after being ordered to fight to their last bullet.

Hepburn illustrates this gross injustice through the eyes of Young Callum, who joins the regiment with his pals as something of a lark, with any prospect of war a far-off abstraction. The adventure he embarks on as he is thrown a lifeline in France by a young woman called Catriona following Churchill’s betrayal is both a life-changing romance and a wake-up call regarding the dishonesty of those in power.

Hepburn frames his own production with Callum telling his story through a series of letters to his younger brother, while his older self watches over him. The result is a moving and poignant study of how young lives can be turned upside down and used as cannon fodder. In Callum’s case, he at least finds salvation after suffering such heavy losses.

Hepburn’s script weaves all this together with an intelligence and lightness of touch that remains the right side of sentimental, and is gifted with a trio of lovely performances. James Rottger makes a wide-eyed Young Callum, whose getting of wisdom comes through Ashley Smith’s sparky and more street-smart Catriona. Ron Donachie brings an avuncular gravitas to illustrate the all too real human cost of a piece of history shamefully hidden by those who helped shape it.

The Herald, March 18th 2020

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