Browns of Leith
Five stars
Where do lost boys go to die? The cool kids who have read Andrew O’Hagan’s novel will already be in the know before they step into the converted Leith warehouse space where Edinburgh site specific auteurs Grid Iron’s big new stage version takes place.
For those who don’t know the story, it revolves around the life long bromance between Tully and Jimmy, aka Noodles, two small town Ayrshire boys with ideas above their station weaned on books, records and films. In the post punk eighties of Thatcher’s Britain, these things were both education and lifeline.
The first half of the show sees our likely lads embark on a great adventure over one glorious lost weekend in Manchester seeing the Smiths, New Order and The Fall at the Festival of the Tenth Summer. This was the celebration of the city’s music scene a decade after it was ignited by the Sex Pistols’ incendiary appearance at Manchester’s Lesser Free Trade Hall. A few decades on, and Tully and Noodles are reunited for some infinitely more grown up stuff that even records and books can’t fix.
Adapted and directed by Grid Iron’s Ben Harrison, the production sees designer Jen McGinley utilise the venue’s industrial roots to replicate Manchester’s clubland a couple of years before Acid House broke. A life-size cut out of Factory Records frontman Tony Wilson watches over proceedings, while mock-ups of Hacienda posters line the walls.
On stage, Matthew Pidgeon as Noodles is our narrator as he and Tully’s younger selves played by Kieran Devine and Jude Bain run riot. With Graham Mackay-Bruce’s Tully beside him, it is as if the pair are rewinding their past like an old mixtape that forms the show’s John Peel friendly soundtrack as it runs alongside grainy video footage of the bands that saved their lives.
What follows is in part a dramatic eulogy to the last gasps of middle youth for that particular generation who came of age in the 1980s. It is also a celebration of friendship, the moments that shape it, and what it eventually becomes beyond the banter and the boozing as real life gets in the way. As Noodles, Pidgeon conveys the right mix of adulthood and mischief, with Mackay-Bruce bringing Tully to full mercurial life. This is enabled with support from an equally riotous Paul McCole and John McGeachie.
Of course, as with every boy’s own story, it is the women who have to put up with the nonsense and tidy up the mess. This is made clear here as Carmen Piaraccini doubles up as Tully’s free thinking mother Barbara and Noodles’ other half, Iona. It is brought home even more in Lucianne McEvoy’s portrayal of Tully’s partner, Anna. As McEvoy taps into all the mixed emotions of happiness, heartbreak and frustration at having to indulge one final all-lad’s-together life-and-death wheeze, her performance beautifully encapsulates the flipsides of love and anger felt by Anna as she prepares to be abandoned.
Of course, one could quibble at some of the dialogue occasionally getting lost in the warehouse acoustics, or else crave the volume of the music to be ramped up to make something more anthemic. Then again, anyone who visited the Hacienda during its early days will know that it too had similar teething troubles, so on the nineteenth anniversary of Tony Wilson’s death, thumbs up for accidental authenticity.
As the era Mayflies depicts becomes increasingly historicised, in the end, it is a dramatic love letter to that era's spirit, when for the serious young men and dole queue intellectuals at the heart of its story, the possibilities were endless. As for the lost boys who are no longer around who the show honours, they live forever in books and records. Sometimes they are immortalised on stage and screen. Like this show, they should be cherished.
Until Aug 30, 4pm.
The Herald, August 12, 2026
ends
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