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Dear Billy

Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh

Four stars


Stop me if you’ve heard this one before, but without Billy Connolly, Scotland’s culture would be a very different place. Just ask Gary McNair, who performs this 90-minute homage to the Big Yin, the twinkly-eyed raconteur who stumbled out of the Glasgow shipyards and into the folk clubs before becoming an international treasure. Even as Connolly’s patter went global, he gave voice to Scotland’s working class in a way that was funny, smart and unashamedly, scurrilously rude. 

Beginning with the premise that everyone has a story about Billy Connolly - and this writer unintentionally proved the point during a pre-show chat while attempting to claim the opposite – McNair has gathered up a series of interviews conducted with anyone and everyone with an opinion on Connolly. Knitted together in Joe Douglas’s National Theatre of Scotland production, McNair’s verbatim vox-pop collage is part stand-up, part oral history project, and part act of collective hero worship.  

As he moves between neon styled totems of Connolly’s back catalogue that includes a banana boots chair forming part of Claire Halleran’s set, McNair fires off a stream of bite-size anecdotes in a multitude of voices honed during happy hours in spit and sawdust pub snugs. These move between the comic to the out and out absurd, occasionally alighting on more fragile real life territory. In this way, Connolly becomes something of a potty-mouthed messiah, who crosses social boundaries in a way that at one point literally saves lives. 

Accompanied by composer Simon Liddell’s gently insistent folksy score, played live by Liddell with multi instrumentalist Jill O’Sullivan on Halleran’s social club carpet, McNair eventually comes clean with his own brief encounter with Connolly. It’s a memoir as delightfully unreliable as any other on show here in a surprisingly thoughtful love letter to McNair’s inspiration that becomes a rallying cry for the collective power of the common touch, rude words included. 


The Herald, May 22nd 2023

ends

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