Òran Mór, Glasgow
Three stars
When the Reverend John Home’s play, Douglas, first appeared in 1757, its romantic verse drama was a sensation. Arriving at the vanguard of the Scottish Enlightenment, Home’s play was hailed as the future by those hanging on to its commercial coat tails, while at the same time outraging those who saw any theatre at all as the Devil’s work.
Probably Douglas’s greatest gift to popular culture is the phrase called out by a fired-up audience member that gives Brian Logan’s new play its title. Several centuries on, history has largely forgotten Home’s opus, with the last professional Scottish production dating back to 1989, when Robert David MacDonald directed it at Glasgow’s Citizens Theatre.
This is a useful marker for Logan’s back stage romp, which charts Douglas’s irresistible rise through the eyes of Home, his play’s champions who think they are about to hit the big time, and the naysayers who effectively had him chucked out of the church.
The latest lunchtime production as part of A Play, a Pie and a Pint’s autumn season sees Logan’s own production knit all this together in a way that is part literary history, part Carry On Up the Enlightenment. Lewie Watson’s Home treads a fine line between supporters such as Kevin Lennon’s Alexander Carlyle and Fraser Sivewright’s David Hume, as well as his more phlegmatic opponents played by Gavin Jon Wright. Home and co’s central defence of the play and theatre in general actually recalls MacDonald’s own invocations of the artist’s lot in works such as Webster, about Jacobean dramatist John Webster, and Chinchilla, modelled on Diaghilev.
While Home never lived up to his potential as the people’s playwright in Scotland, finding more comfort in London, he remains a key figure in the nation’s fragmented dramatic history who is brought to life by Logan and co with an irreverent yet respectful doff of the cap.
The Herald, October 1st 2026
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