This is Memorial Device, Wee Red Bar
If you attend the Edinburgh International Book Festival in search of any drama that isn’t an author ding-dong or a gripping reading, then you are usually barking up the wrong Festival. But this year one of the most immersive, imaginative and in-demand theatre shows across the Edinburgh festivals is to be found tucked into the Wee Red Bar.
This accurately named space is Edinburgh College of Art’s student union, scene of many a grimy indie show over the years. And there on the wall is the poster for Memorial Device’s solitary ECA gig, way back in the mid-1980s.
Airdrie’s best kept musical secret only actually exist in the pages of David Keenan’s 2017 fictional memoir recounting the heady (read: obscure) North Lanarkshire underground music scene of the early 1980s but thanks to the Lyceum Theatre, director Graham Eatough, actor Paul Higgins and some showroom dummies, these pretentious indie upstarts are conjured up in the distorted fever dream that is This Is Memorial Device ****.
Higgins plays Ross Raymond, a local fanzine writer and unofficial chronicler of “the glory years in Airdrie – where everything seemed impossible”. Familiarity with this Glasgow satellite town is not a requirement for enjoyment of the show, but knowledge of urban commuter belt culture is an advantage, as is an interest in – or better still an obsession with niche alternative music.
There is much to recognise here for the fan of Throbbing Gristle or Nurse With Wound, especially when Raymond delves into Memorial Device’s backstory using a Pete Frame Rock Family Trees-style graphic. But there is a wider point to be made about creative possibilities, self-belief and good old-fashioned escapism from post-industrial smalltown drudgery.
Raymond is a true believer and Higgins plays him with unfettered conviction. The play sags a little when he is not front and centre, dressing up shop mannequins to represent the four band members and poetically outlining their characteristics. Other voices are invoked via filmed interviews, with Julie Wilson Nimmo, Sanjeev Kohli and others playing fans, friends and contemporaries recalling escapades and ambitions from back in the day.
But it is Raymond who is truly lost in the music – beautifully composed in a Velvet Underground style by real-life Scottish indie legend Stephen Pastel and sound designer Gavin Thomson – and when he rouses the audience as though reaching the climax of a Memorial Device gig, he is conducting a symphony for fellow fanatics.
Cassie Workman: Aberdeen, Just the Tonic Nucleus
Comedian and actor Cassie Workman also creates a fantasy scenario around a cherished musical artist – but this rock star is, or was a very real inspiration for generations of outsider kids. Aberdeen **** is a beautifully written and performed hour-long poem in which Workman imagines herself transported to Kurt Cobain’s hometown in Washington State on a mission to save the doomed Nirvana frontman from himself.
Like Keenan and Eatough’s portrayal of Airdrie, she expertly evokes the ugliness but also decayed beauty of this bereft former logging town, where even the trees have upped sticks. She finds common ground and common cause with Cobain, regarding him as a Christ-like talisman who maybe could have made the world a better place if he had lived.
Her venue, Just the Tonic Nucleus, is a former church and there is a strong sense of devotion, supplication and benediction to her carefully weighted words. The audience sit close to her, in the round, enhancing the intimacy of the experience. Workman is an absorbing, authoritative performer. Her pacing and delivery become lighter, springier as her narrative moves to the musical town of Olympia, where Cobain wrote much of Nevermind. But we know where this is heading – to drug abuse, mental health problems and “an end utterly devoid of poetry”.
Fanboy, Pleasance Dome
Writer/performer Joe Sellman-Leava also grapples with the trials and tribulations of fandom in the smart and tender Fanboy ****, playing at the Pleasance Dome. He plays the eponymous eternal enthusiast, voraciously consuming science fiction, superhero and fantasy films, books and games, hoovering up nature documentaries and collecting merchandise like a magpie, utterly immersed in his various passions and oblivious to the changing world around him.
His fun uncle Obi is an early spirit guide and eventually he finds his (opposing) tribes in bezzie mate Wayne and girlfriend Gaia. The latter shares Joe’s nuanced, liberal outlook on life and Star Wars; the former becomes the archetypal sneering, abusive keyboard warrior, an embodiment of the more toxic, absolutist aspects of fandom in the internet age.
But there are two other key relationships at play in this seamlessly performed show – Joe’s relationship with his younger and older selves. Young Joe, played onscreen with joyous naturalism by Ethan El Shaater, is curious about everything – not least the plot of the latest Star Wars film. The dilemma for Joe is does he deliver and/or receive the spoiler – not just for the movie plot, but for life itself.
Brown Boys Swim, Pleasance Dome
Also playing at the Pleasance Dome, Brown Boys Swim **** is a gorgeous, touching portrait of the friendship between two Asian teenagers, the excitable Kash and the introverted Mohsen, who are both determined to learn to swim so that they can attend a schoolmate’s pool party from which they have been excluded. Both are liberal Muslims dreaming big in their own way but also desperate to fit in and Karim Khan’s heart-warming and gut-wrenching script expertly captures the scourge of racial profiling and their desire to flourish despite the obstacles in their way.
