Bailey Newsome

The Scaff

02/04/24

Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh

For someone who has always maintained a complete indifference to the game of football, I do seem to be watching a lot of plays about it lately, all of them at the Traverse. And the thing is, the standard has been incredibly high. First up, there was the five-star masterpiece that was Moorcroft. Then there was the wonderful Same Team, which also found a fresh approach to its chosen subject. Now here’s The Scaff, the final offering in the A Play, A Pie and A Pint spring season, which I approach with some trepidation.

Can the Traverse really hope to pull off a hat trick?

Happily, it turns out that they can. Written by Stephen Christopher and Graeme Smith, this is an assured and acerbically funny play, centred around a school football team. Jamie (Bailey Newsome) and Frankie (Stuart Edgar) live and breathe for the game. They spend most of their time out on the pitch, helping the team’s star player, Coco (Craig McClean), to rack up the goals. They’re also friends with Liam (Benjamin Keachie), but one day Jamie overhears Coco referring to Liam as ‘a scaff’. And while there may be some truth in the accusation – Liam’s Mum does buy own-brand crisps and Liam is forced to play in Mitzuma football boots, for God’s sake – Jamie encourages Liam to take his revenge on Coco by unleashing a hard tackle in the next game.

Liam takes his friend’s advice with disastrous consequences. Coco’s resulting injury means that the team will be without their top scorer as they approach the school cup final. Liam is in disgrace – and can Jamie and Frankie even admit to being friends with a boy who is now little more than a pariah?

Of course, The Scaff is about so much more than football. It concentrates on the subject of friendship and the difficulties that life can throw into its path. It’s also about the the constant longing to be liked and the awful fear of thinking that you are hated for things you have no control over. And mostly, it’s about the difficulties of escaping from an identity that others have bestowed on you, a term that is as degrading as it is dismissive.

The performances of the four leads are strong, each actor convincing in his respective role. I particularly enjoy Keachie’s physicality as a boy almost crippled by anxiety, forever giving sidelong glances to his companions, beseeching them for support and also forgiveness. Director Jordan Blackwood handles the tricky problem of making a quartet of actors on a bare stage convince as team players, and the performers give it their best, leaping, twirling and launching savage kicks at an imaginary ball. They manage to pull off the illusion, with the audience reacting delightedly to each successive goal. I find myself yelling and clapping along with them, something that no actual football match has never managed to make me do.

It’s been another strong season for A Play, A Pie and A Pint, and The Scaff provides a winning finalé that scores on just about every level.

4.6 stars

Philip Caveney

Moorcroft

24/10/23

Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh

It’s Garry (Martin Docherty)’s 50th birthday and he’s not in the mood for a celebration. Instead, he prefers to think back to his teenage years and the wee amateur football team he put together with his best friends in Renfrew. He warns us in advance, this isn’t going to be an easy ride…

He assembles his crew. For starters, there’s Mick (Jatinder Singh Randhawa), once a promising member of a junior football team, now plying his trade as a hairdresser. There’s Tubs (Dylan Wood), who is gay – and in a 1980s small town, that’s seriously difficult – and there’s Paul (Sean Connor), struggling to cope with an abusive, alcoholic father. Noodles (Santino Smith) appears to be the most successful of the crew, with a decent job and the money to pay for some fancy football shirts (but should they be that shade of maroon?). Sooty (Kyle Gardiner) is a dedicated mod with a fishtail parka and no higher ambition than to ‘do a Quadrophenia’ and ride his scooter to Brighton, while Mince (Bailey Newsome) has an uncanny propensity for saying the wrong thing at the wrong time… every time.

But from their very first training session, the teammates work well together. The go from strength to strength, finding pleasure in the simple joys of kicking a ball around a pitch. They are blissfully unaware that darker times are inexorably closing in on them.

Moorcroft, written and directed by Elidh Loan, is a fabulous slice of theatre, one that moves effortlessly through a whole series of emotions. It swerves from raucous hilarity to visceral anger to heartrending tragedy with all the sure-footed precision of a well-drilled team. There are superb performances from the entire cast – particularly from Newsome as the slow-witted but oddly adorable Mince – and I especially enjoy the physical sequences as the team leap, twirl and kick their way through a series of energetic routines backed by a selection of 80s bangers. Loan knows exactly when to switch the mood. One minute I’m laughing out loud, the next my eyes are filling with tears.

It would be so easy to dismiss this as ‘a play about football’ but it’s much more than that. Moorcroft is a meditation on masculinity, its strengths, its weaknesses. It’s a reflection on the everyday deprivation of working-class life, and it’s a lament about the awful injustice of fate. Compelling and propulsive throughout, it never once relaxes its powerful grip.

It shoots, it scores. It’s a winner.

5 stars

Philip Caveney

Write-Off

21/03/23

Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh

The A Play, A Pie and a Pint season continues its cracking run with this intriguing two-hander, written by Aodhan Gallagher and directed by Irene McDougall. It’s a play about writers and writing, so naturally I’m fascinated to see what it has to say about the subject – and, as it turns out, it has plenty. What’s more, I’m delighted to note how many unexpected twists and turns are packed into a brisk fifty-minute running time.

Freddie (Richard Conlon) is a long-established fiction writer, currently preparing to start work on a new novel – most of which is already a stack of crumpled notes in his wastebasket. He’s never seen the necessity for incorporating elements from his own life into the gritty psychological thrillers he’s made his reputation on. These are brutal tales filled with violence and action. But lately, Freddie’s publishers have become a little twitchy, pointing out that his earlier work is increasingly being perceived as ‘problematic’. 

With this in mind, they’ve suggested that this time around, he might want to employ a ‘sensitivity reader’, somebody more attuned to contemporary issues. Enter Ben (Bailey Newsome), the promising student of one of Freddie’s literary acquaintances. Ben is young, gay and confidently in touch with the zeitgeist. He sports a beanie hat and trendy footwear. He also has an unpublished novel of his own that he’s very keen to get noticed…

Write-Off’s acerbic dialogue hooks me from the get-go and my sympathies bounce from character to character as the two men, by turns adversaries and allies, discuss their respective ambitions, beliefs and motives. One moment I’m laughing out loud at Freddie’s caustic observations, the next I’m gasping at some new revelation from Ben, which I genuinely haven’t seen coming. Can these two men ever hope to settle their differences enough to work together on a project?

The performances of the two actors are utterly believable and while it could be argued that this is a piece that’s completely predicated on its quickfire dialogue – and might work just as effectively as a radio play – it’s nonetheless a compelling and challenging production that maintains its propulsive edge right up to the final scene.

I head straight from the play to The National Library of Scotland where – inevitably – I’m working on my new novel. Who says life doesn’t imitate art?

4 stars

Philip Caveney

Oor Wullie: The Musical

28/01/20

King’s Theatre, Edinburgh

Jings and crivvens!

Wullie and I are old acquaintances. He appeared every week in the comics I read as a child back in the 1960s, but he first saw the light of day in 1936 and has endured over the decades, recently clocking up his eightieth anniversary. Last year, his image made millions for charity with the Big Bucket Trail, which featured individually decorated statues of the iconic kid from Auchenshoogle in various locations around Scotland.

This musical, by the same team who brought The Broons to the stage, features  a sprightly and raucous collection of songs in a wide range of styles. The simplicity of the storyline would seem to make it a good fit for a younger audience. Indeed, the kids in the auditorium tonight are clearly enjoying the proceedings (especially when Wullie’s pet mouse, Jeemy, makes an appearance), but the majority of the audience are older people, here to reconnect with something fondly remembered from their childhoods.

Wahid (Eklovey Kashyap) is a teenage boy, born in Scotland to Pakistani parents. He’s having a hard time fitting in, forever being asked if he ‘likes his new home.’ Well-meaning neighbours ask him where he’s really from, while the school bullies enjoy making fun of him at every opportunity. Wahid is Scottish, but somehow, ‘not-Scottish,’ and he’s beginning to struggle with his own identity.

In the school library, he meets up with the mysterious librarian (George Brennan), who gives him an Oor Wullie annual to read, telling him it’s the perfect introduction to ‘being Scottish.’ Wahid is somewhat taken aback when Wullie (Martin Quinn) appears in his bedroom, claiming to be in search of his famous bucket, which has unexpectedly gone missing. Wahid remembers that he saw just such a bucket in the school library, so the two of them set off in search of it.

It isn’t long before Wullie is joined by his gang – Bob (Dan Buckley), Wee Eck (Grant McIntyre), Soapy Soutar (Bailey Newsome) and Primrose (Leah Byrne). They are not surprised to discover that the bucket has been purloined by arch enemy, Basher McKenzie (Leanne Traynor), and the kids enlist their old adversary PC Murdoch (Ann Louise Ross) to help them retrieve it. In the second half, the comic book characters take Wahid into the fictional world of Auchenshoogle, where their clothes transform from black and white into full colour.

Valiant attempts are made to make Wullie more relevant to a modern day audience. There’s a song that features him performing a duet with Alexa, for instance and there’s a nice bit of inclusivity where the cast put on saris and leap about to a bhangra-style tune. PC Murdoch gets an opportunity to strut his stuff to a rock song and there’s some funny interplay between him and an amorous teacher (Irene MacDougall).

If there’s an over-riding problem, however, it’s that the drama fails to generate any genuine sense of peril. Wullie wants his bucket back, but we’re never entirely sure why its so important to him, nor indeed what will happen if he doesn’t get it. The result is never less than knockabout fun, but here’s a musical that doesn’t seem entirely sure about what kind of audience it’s trying to appeal to.

To my mind, it’s surely one for the kids, assuming you can get them away from their phones and tablets for a couple of hours. Wullie has been an enduring character over the decades and there’s no reason why a new generation of youngsters shouldn’t fall for his charms, given half a chance.

3.5 stars

Philip Caveney