Showing @ Scottish National Portrait Gallery, Edinburgh until Sat 03 May @ times vary
In this second promenade production from the National Theatre of Scotland and co-directors Joe Douglas and Catrin Evans, twenty Scottish writers have been commissioned to do a five-minute missive starting ‘Dear Scotland’. Actors give voice to a host of people, living and dead, in portraits on the wall: royals, celebrities, writers and trade unionists.
Each monologue (bitter warnings and glowing testimonials) is a postcard to the nation in the referendum year. Some of the individual performances are miniature masterpieces but others miss the mark. The audience – in small groups, with tours starting every 10 minutes – are ushered towards Carl Court’s photograph of The Queen. Writer Johnny McKnight and performer Colin McCredie have the monarch talking about the indignity of being played by ‘Helen Fucking Mirren’ rather than Judi Dench.
‘I don’t recognise it as myself,’ writes Janice Galloway voicing Muriel Spark (performed by Anneika Rose) in another oration. The gutsy novelist is the last person who needs anyone speaking on her behalf but Spark’s terse turn of phrase is captured well. Famous for her short sharp novels, Spark may well have said that she likes to ‘keep it brisk, I’m not Mrs Tolstoy’. Or is this Galloway talking? With Ken Currie‘s eerie painting The Three Oncologists we hear the doctors’ own words on headphones. One says ‘independence would be a pity but not a disaster’. Is this very personal view different from King James’s pro-union ranting?
The pieces feel easier to digest when the subject brings little or no historical baggage (the positions of Burns or King James are well known) but things get complicated when the subject is still living. The high concept brings paintings to startling life in the mausoleum atmosphere of the domineering gallery, but the politics might get in the way for some. There are no lifeboats here for floating voters. On the way out one Edinburgh patron turned to another and summed things up with the deathless remark, ‘it was very well organised.’