Remember the Sixties? Those heady days “between Love Me Do and Let it Be” when fighting in the streets was a badge of honour and you lived and breathed the certainly that this generation was the one who wouldn’t get fooled again? Well, renowned playwright David Edgar remembers them. He was a Manchester University student when the riots burst out all over Europe. He was in the action, roneoing protest leaflets all night with his socialist comrades (happiest night of his life) and planning the alternative society.
But now – well, he’s 70 and wonders with horror how his generation have abandoned their tie-dyed principles, settled down and voted in their droves for Brexit.
For, as he entertainingly revealed in Trying It On, it is not working class Labour voters who voted Leave, but rather the over-65s – his generation, and the ones who have benefited most from the changes social liberalism has brought since 1968.
With taped interviews of his leftie contemporaries and some pointed yet humorous interrogation of the audience, he tries to make sense of what’s happened.
And he has to answer to his harshest critic – himself at the height of his altruistic 20s. Has he sold out? Have we all sold out? And what are the battles still to be fought?
And then an effective twist in the tale turns the tables on his affluent musings and delivers a humbling message. Trying It On is at once excellent drama, an insight into social history and a clear-sighted look at what the passage of time does to us all.
The National Trust for Scotland’s Gladstone’s Land property provides the intriguing set for A Game of Death and Chance – a journey back in time to find out why we are where we are.
A guide takes us up and down windy staircases into four different rooms. In each we meet a character who could give us clues to our past, present and future.
Lucky Lucy, with the help of Death, recounts the terrible times of the Covenanting wars and the plague which devastated 17th century Scotland.
In the next, the plausible Somerville persuades us that investing in sure-fire winner the Darien Scheme is the way forward for Scots.
But we then encounter a belligerent and emasculated Caledonia, lolling in a bed with Union flag pillows, despairing of past glories and present indignities. And finally we meet the delightfully dressed Daniel Defoe, who wishes to usher Scotland into a wonderful new era of the Union, complete with financial backhanders of course.
Illuminating, entertaining and well acted, this hour’s journey revealing the crucial steps to the loss of Scotland’s identity provides much food for thought.
Hero of the Enlightenment, economic genius, eccentric oddball, mother’s boy – and one of the greatest Scots who ever lived – that’s Adam Smith.
Walk down the High Street and you will pass his grave in the Canongate Kirk, turn the corner and you are at the place where he lived and died, Panmure House. Rescued from near dereliction by Heriot-Watt University, it is the perfect setting to find out more about the life of the man in Adam Smith: The Invisible Hand.
This four-hander written and performed by a Kirkcaldy theatre group gives us a good idea of the man and the environment he lived in. From the cosseted son of a possessive mother, he moved from his home town to academic success in Glasgow and Oxford, to touring France and discussing revolution and royalty with Rousseau and Voltaire.
But his path was not easy as his works of genius, especially The Wealth of Nations, were written when even those closest to you could become your mortal enemy.
Paul Samson and Susan Coyle are to be congratulated for their performances as Adam and his mother Elizabeth.
An excellent production.
