Skip to main content

So Long, Wee Moon

Arts at Loaningdale, Biggar 

Four stars

 

Hollywood is a long way from rural 1920s Clydesdale in Martin Travers’ new play for the Braw Clan company, set up in 2023 to produce plays in Scots. In a cramped cottage, teenage Nancy’s fantasies of becoming a star of the big screen like her silent movie idols beamed into the local picturehouse are all she has to escape the everyday drudgery she looks set to be stuck with forever. 

 

With her mother Annie out at church and her bedbound granny wheezing her way to oblivion in the other room, Nancy is free to sing, dance, put on lipstick and cut her hair, with only the mirror on the wall for an audience. Only a mountain of dirty laundry is holding her back from making the big time. Five years on, and a prodigal’s return in the wake of the talkies sees Nancy’s sister Wee Moon harbour her own dreams of fame as history looks set to repeat itself. 

 

There is something Tennessee Williams-like about Travers’ heroines in Rosalind Sydney’s production, brought to life by a trio of fine actresses. Chiara Sparkes’ Nancy is a Clydesdale Blanche DuBois before her time, whose dreams turn sour and leave her broken. Helen McAlpine’s Annie is trapped by her own anger, and Morven Blackadder’s Wee Moon is a wide-eyed innocent about to step out into the big bad world. 

 

Travers’ play says much about the ambitions of bright young working class women, only for them to be brutalised by forces beyond their control. It says much too about how pop culture came to be dominated by the hip-talking Americanisms that Nancy has affected in place of her own speech patterns.

 

Sydney’s production is played out on Jessica Brettle’s living room set flanked by washing lines, and pulsed by Pippa Murphy’s elegiac score. Both Murphy's soundscape and the presence of footlights are impressionistic pointers to the occasional leaps into fantasy signified by Paul Rodger’s lighting. Like the would be screen queens at its centre, this is a play that reaches for the stars.


The Herald, September 23rd 2024

 

ends

 

 

Comments

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) ...

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...

Andrew Midgley obituary

Born October 26th 1965 Died October 28th 2010 Andrew Midgley, who has died of a heart attack during a session in a Musselburgh gym aged forty-five, didn’t look like a pop star. Neither did this most garrulously playful of raconteurs particularly enjoy talking about his brief time in the charts during the early 1990s. Yet, while there was far more to this most singular of autodidacts, as one half of club-dance duo Cola Boy, Midgley caught the pop-rave zeitgeist with appearances on Top of the Pops performing the band’s infectiously catchy top ten hit, Seven Ways To Love. Even here, however, just as he would later apply diligence and care behind the scenes as a sub-editor on the Edinburgh Evening News, creating two of the funniest websites on the planet or managing an award-winning comedian, the man nicknamed ‘Boy Naughty’ preferred to stay in the background, allowing former Wham! backing singer turned Radio Two DJ Janey Lee Grace to bask in the day-glo spotlight of the period. Mid...