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The Kelton Hill Fair

Tron Theatre, Glasgow

Four stars 

 

Teenage Flo has been brought before her social worker and a policeman to find out why she hit her teacher. Flo is in care, her best friend has died, and she writes stories to help her survive. When a mysterious figure wielding a guitar appears and encourages Flo to take charge of her life and live it on her own terms, the sanctuary she finds when she runs away isn’t always what it seems. 

 

As opening gambits go, one might be forgiven for presuming Robbie Gordon and Jack Nurse’s new play for their Wonder Fools company to be an exercise in everyday social realism. Instead, while Flo’s traumas are explored, Nurse’s production takes a more fantastical turn, as Flo ends up at a kind of fantasy dinner party with historical figures after stumbling on a Shangri-la of sorts in the hills of Dumfries and Galloway.

 

The fair on Kelton Hill is occupied by serial killer William Hare, vainglorious national bard Robert Burns, and feminist firebrand writer Lady Florence Dixie. All find themselves holed up in a kind of limbo overseen by legendary Romany figurehead Billy Marshall. 

 

Created with a group of young theatre apprentices from the area the play is set, and steeped in a local mythology, Gordon and Nurse’s construction is a wild and deceptively fun affair that addresses the power of the imagination, even as it tackles the institutional failures of the care system. Like a hyperactive brain bursting at the seams, the show’s mash up of fantasy, Stuart Ramage and Roan Ballantine’s folk songs and time travelling fable is a riot of ideas and invention. 

 

Most of the cast double up between fantasy and reality. Julie Wilson-Nimmo’s social worker and Michael Dylan’s wet liberal copper hilariously skirt around the absurdities of self censoring linguistics before flying into the horrible histories of Lady Dixie and Hare. Michael Donaghy is both a creepy teacher and a mercurial Robert Burns, while Sam Stopford as Billy lets the big man’s mask slip beyond the charm.

 

Laura Lovemore makes a suitably potty-mouthed foil for Flo as Lizzie, but it is Flo on whom the play pivots.  Ava Hickey plays her as an angry young woman in search of a creative outlet as she dives into the nightmare of Billy’s wonderland headfirst. By the time she gets back to the real world once more, it may be no place like home, but the truth is about to hurt in a wild theatrical ride.


The Herald, March 28th 2025

 

ends

 

 

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