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Battery Park

Tron Theatre, Glasgow

Four stars

When a solitary middle aged drinker called Tommy is distracted from his pint at Greenock Bowling Club by a Glasgow University student doing a dissertation on Britpop’s lesser known never-wheres, Tommy is stirred to rewind on his past gone mad. That was when he was songwriter and guitarist with Battery Park, the band he formed with his brother Ed and their drummer mate Biffy. 

Confronted by another woman called Angie at their first gig, female singer Robyn is drafted in to pick up the slack. With success in their sights, however, old demons rear their ugly head. Thirty years on, Lucy wants to know where Tommy’s loyalties lie, and she’s not just talking about Oasis v Blur. 

Andy McGregor’s new play is the latest in an ever-expanding rock family tree of dramatic evocations of small town bands that never quite make it. This sense of familiarity doesn’t take away any of the potty mouthed charm of McGregor’s drama, which he writes, directs and composes the live indie-rock score for, with lyrics co-written with fellow playwright Isla Cowan. 


There is wit and pathos aplenty among the set up of McGregor’s production, played out on designer Kenneth MacLeod’s Bowling Club mock up. As the band, Charlie West makes Biffy a typically dumb drummer, Tommy McGowan depicts Ed’s decline with sensitivity, and Kim Allan’s Robyn is every inch the ambitious diva in waiting. Chloe-Ann Tyler doubles up as Angie and Lucy with energetic zeal, and it’s not hard to see how Stuart Edgar’s wet behind the ears younger Tommy ended up as disillusioned as Chris Alexander’s older version. 

What Battery Park and other plays of its ilk are tapping into in this wave of guitar wielding 1980s and 1990s set yarns is recognition that the eras their creators’ came of age in is now historically significant enough to be fictionalised. The song may remain the same in this co-production between McGregor’s Sleeping Warrior Theatre Company Greenock’s Beacon Arts Centre, but as David Essex, star of two 1970s music biz fictions might put it, rock on.


The Herald, September 29th 2023

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