Oran Mor, Glasgow Four stars Prime Ministers telling very public lies in order to save their own skin isn’t a recent phenomenon. As this revival of Stuart Hepburn’s Second World War play first seen at Oran Mor’s A Play, a Pie and a Pint lunchtime theatre initiative in 2017 makes clear, when Winston Churchill announced the so-called ‘miracle of Dunkirk’ that saw 350,000 British troops evacuated to safety, he wasn’t quite telling the whole story. In fact, he had cut a deal that saw the men of the 51st Highland Division hung out to dry as collateral damage on the frontline, where 9,000 of them were forced to surrender after being ordered to fight to their last bullet. Hepburn illustrates this gross injustice through the eyes of Young Callum, who joins the regiment with his pals as something of a lark, with any prospect of war a far-off abstraction. The adventure he embarks on as he is thrown a lifeline in France by a young woman called Catriona following Churchill’s betrayal is
An archive of arts writing by Neil Cooper. Effete No Obstacle.