Scottish Storytelling Centre
Four stars
Meet Bonnie. Bonnie’s the Scottish lassie in the tracky top who’s just slunk on stage to say hi - well, awright, actually - and looks like she’s got something else to say besides. Over the next 75 minutes of Fraser Scott’s solo play, Bonnie tells all about who she is and where she comes from. More importantly, she says it in her own accent. It’s the one she learnt growing up with her Papa, and it’s the one the posh kids laugh at and the Americans treat as a novelty. As she learns along the way, however, it is the only voice she’s got, and if you’ve got it, flaunt it.
As brought to life by a magnificent Olivia Caw, Bonnie is a whirlwind of working class Scottish self-determination. In-between learning about what words are worth on bookshelves in other places at university, Bonnie gives the audience a few lessons in the power of saying some of the choicest words with a Scots accent, and how their meanings can change and evolve because of it.
Bonnie comes from a long line of fictional heroines who learn to speak in their own voice, from East Anglian fireball Beatie Bryant in Arnold Wesker’s play, Roots, to Willie Russell’s Scouse autodidact in Educating Rita. While all three have been written by men, Scott’s script similarly sits in a canon of contemporary Scottish writers who write in their own demotic. James Kelman in particular understands the power of what refined readers might call a four-letter word.
In a world where the BBC has just decided to apologise for weather presenter Judith Ralston’s Scottish accent, you can see what Bonnie is up against. The result is a show that is part rites of passage, part celebration of Scots in all its tongues and part call to arms for keeping it alive enough to tell the tale as eloquently as Bonnie does.
Until Aug 31, 2.45pm.
The Herald, August 18, 2026
ends
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