Skip to main content

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

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Billy Elliot The Musical

Edinburgh Playhouse Five stars A big National Coal Board sign looms large at the opening of Lee Hall and Elton John's decade-old musical stage version of Hall and director Stephen Daldry's hit turn of the century film. In a tale of one little boy's liberation as a dancer against the backdrop of the 1980s miners strike, however, the Durham Miners banner and the 'Save Our Community' sash held aloft matter more. It is this call to arms that forms the heart of Daldry's production, as Billy becomes a potty-mouthed beacon of hope in a situation where picket line, thin blue line and chorus line rub uneasily up against each other. Given such a context, there is bound to be some pretty grown-up stuff going on here, be it the institutionalised homophobia in Billy's village, the class war going on within it, or Billy's grieving for his dead mother that drives his every move. And, as so magnificently choreographed by Peter Darling, what moves they are. Watch...
Post a Comment
Read more

Myra Mcfadyen - An Obituary

Myra McFadyen – Actress   Born January 12th 1956; died October 18th 2024   Myra McFadyen, who has died aged 68, was an actress who brought a mercurial mix of lightness and depth to her work on stage and screen. Playwright and artistic director of the Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh, David Greig, called McFadyen “an utterly transformative, shamanic actor who could change a room and command an audience with a blink”. Citizens’ Theatre artistic director Dominic Hill described McFadyen’s portrayal of Puck in his 2019 production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre in London as “funny, mischievous and ultimately heartbreaking.”   For many, McFadyen will be most recognisable from Mamma Mia!, the smash hit musical based around ABBA songs. McFadyen spent two years on the West End in Phyllida Lloyd’s original 1999 stage production, and was in both film offshoots. Other big screen turns included Rob Roy (1995) and Our Ladies (2019), both directed by Mi...
1 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) ...
Post a Comment
Read more