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The Legend of Davie McKenzie

Oran Mor, Glasgow

Three stars 

 

Life is one great big action movie for Davie and Sean. It’s always been that way, ever since they met across a garden fence when they were wee. Davie reckons he’s seen every film ever made, so it’s only right that he calls the shots, and they become Butch and Sundance to the end. Or at least until their playacting leads the pair down a darker road, and they end up in the same prison. 

 

It is Davie who ends up being the first of the gang to die, alas, prompting a still incarcerated Sean to give his best friend the legendary send off he deserves. He even has the dearly departed around in celestial form to tell him what to do as he always has. For now, anyway. 

 

Stephen Christopher and Graeme Smith’s new play for A Play, a Pie and a Pint’s lunchtime theatre season follows their success with The Scaff and Dancing Shoes with a fantastical rites of passage that takes Sean on a wild goose chase from prison cell to funeral parlour and back again in a mix of the madcap and the moving. 

 

Afton Moran is our narrator as Sean, confessing all in flashback as one might do to a parole board in Jake Sleet’s production, while Ruaraidh Murray is by turns authoritarian and avuncular as various foils. It is Sean Connor as an irrepressible Davie, however, who drives things with a charisma that makes you understand why Sean falls under his spell. 

 

Played out on Gillian Argo’s quietly ingenious set of steel towers transformed into an urban skyline, Christopher and Smith’s play becomes a raw tale of friendship and loss as Sean finally learns to stop being a sidekick and become the hero.  


The Herald, March 6th 2026

 

Ends 

 



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