Gary McNair has never been shy about putting his heroes in the spotlight. This has been the case both with the Glasgow based writer and performer’s masterful solo shows, as well as works penned for others. As far as his self performed works go, McNair has paid tribute to an unholy trinity of poets of one form or another.
McGonagall’s Chronicles (Which Will Be Remembered for a Very Long Time) saw McNair hail Dundee rhymester William McGonagall, while Letters to Morrissey dissected McNair’s fandom of the mercurial former vocalist of The Smiths. More recently, Dear Billy was McNair’s loving homage to the man who is arguably Scotland’s greatest comic talent, Billy Connolly.
‘Talk about the perfect dinner party,’ says McNair, who will be appearing on stage in Edinburgh for the first time in seven years in the National Theatre of Scotland’s production of Dear Billy. This comes following a sell out tour that included dates at Glasgow’s Pavilion Theatre.
‘Juliet Cadzow was there,’ McNair says, mentioning one of Scotland’s acting greats. ‘She said that when she was on her way out to see the show, she just happened to get a phone call off Billy Connolly, and she said, I can’t talk, because I’m going to see a show about you. So Billy Connolly says, tell me if he’s any good, and Juliet says that she will, which is nice.’
Presuming Cadzow gave Connolly a rave review alongside pretty much everyone else who has seen Dear Billy, this should buoy McNair up, both for his own performances, and for his second Fringe show, which sees him revisit a couple of heroes of his own making. These come in the form of Max and Stevie, the two secondary school likely lads last seen in Square Go. McNair’s 2018 collaboration with fellow playwright Kieran Hurley saw the duo come of age by way of preparing for a fight at the school gates, with the stage becoming a wrestling ring.
In V.L, which receives its world premiere at this year’s Fringe, Max and Stevie are forced to navigate similarly high pressure territory, as they pucker up to find someone willing to give them their first kiss lest they become an object of scorn and remain a V.L. – Virgin Lips – forever. Even at such a tender age as Max and Stevie, it seems, sex and violence are at the heart of the unreconstructed Scottish male’s rites of passage.
‘When Square Go landed in London,’ McNair remembers, ‘a lot of people were talking about toxic masculinity by then, but when we wrote it, that wasn’t really part of the discourse yet. We never set out to make a show about toxic masculinity. We were making a show about this horrible thing that we all had to go through, and trying to make sense of it all.
‘After Square Go, Kieran and I carried on talking, and imagining Max and Stevie in various situations, and making each other laugh. We got to a point where essentially we built a world around them, and it felt like we had to take them on this next part of their journey of growing up. They're not that much older than they were in Square Go, so it's not that they've grown up and learned things from the previous piece. It reminds you that growing up is a constant onslaught of being lost in these big things that happen that we that we are pressurised to think that we know things about, and to be wise about, but we're not.’
V.L. not only reunites McNair and Hurley with actors Scott Fletcher and Gavin Jon Wright, who played Max and Stevie in Square Go, but with director Orla O’Loughlin, whose credits include McNair’s play, Locker Room Talk, as well as Hurley’s drama, Mouthpiece. Also on board is producer Francesca Moody, without whom it is possible that Square Go would never have made it on stage.
‘Square Go took seven years to get on,’ says McNair. ‘People seemed to like it, but it wasn’t until it landed on Francesca’s desk at Paines Plough theatre company, where she was then, that things started happening with it. She had faith in it, and when she went freelance, it was the first thing she did with Francesca Moody Productions. If she hadn’t taken a risk with it, I’m not sure where we’d be now.’
Moody went on to produce Fleabag and Baby Reindeer on the Fringe prior to the success of both shows on the small screen. McNair and Hurley’s comedy about violence between young working class Scottish men ‘that really lives or dies on the strength of its patter,’ meanwhile, has been to London and New York, with a new production in Philadelphia pending.
While the universal appeal of Dear Billy could easily run and run, depending on McNair and the NTS’s other commitments, one suspects as well that V.L. won’t be the last we see of Max and Stevie.
‘We've been talking the whole time about what happens next,’ says McNair, ‘but it has to be the right story. Whatever happens, I think Kieran and I will definitely write together again. It’s so much fun. As for Max and Stevie, let’s see what happens. I’m sure we’ll think of something.’
V.L. Paines Plough Roundabout @ Summerhall, 1-26 August, 8.10pm. Dear Billy, Assembly Rooms, Music Hall, 13-25 August, 4.50pm.
The List, August 2024
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