Edinburgh Fringe Theatre reviews: Skye: A Thriller | When Billy Met Alasdair

SKYE: A Thriller

Summerhall (Venue 26)

★★★★☆

When Billy Met Alasdair

Scottish Storytelling Centre (Venue 30)

★★★☆☆

Stands Scotland where it did? Not really; and as a smallish country whose status as a nation is still disputed, it is unusually vulnerable to the internet-driven flood-tides of global culture that seem, for now, to threaten all our old geographical identities with increasing irrelevance.

Within that global culture, though, Scotland has one unassailable role as a tourist destination, the land of lochs, castles and ghost stories; and Ellie Keel’s one-hour drama Skye: A Thriller, at Summerhall, is a clever and well made first play that both exploits and subverts the idea of the Scottish-set ghost story, with the help of a terrific central performance from acclaimed Scottish actress Dawn Steele, best known for her television roles in Monarch Of The Glen and River City.

READ MORE: My Festival: Dawn Steele

The story – set 30 years ago, and remembered by Steele’s character Annie – revolves around a badly shattered middle-class family visiting their holiday home on Skye. There are four children – twin 17 year old sisters Annie and Preenie, brother Brawn a year younger, and little Sammy, only eight; and they are essentially orphaned, following their father’s death in a car accident four years earlier, and their mother’s decline into alcoholism.

One day, though, little Sammy thinks that he spots his father on the local beach. The man does look very like their lost Dad; and when Annie tells Brawn what has happened, she triggers a chain of events in which Brawn’s search for his father becomes ever more feverish, and eventually tragic.

The play takes the form of a present day recording session, in which the much older Annie is contributing to a ghost story podcast; and in Matthew Iliffe’s subtle production, James Robinson – on stage with Steele throughout – delivers a quietly excellent double performance as the recording engineer, and an increasingly frantic Brawn.

The truth around which the play circles, though, is finally far bleaker and more telling than any thrill-a-minute ghost story; and it’s a tribute to Dawn Steele’s skill and integrity, as an actress, that she leads us there in a style so quietly convincing – and so full of unshowy grief – that the effect is finally both enthralling and satisfying, despite the deep sadness of the story she tells.

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Alan Bissett’s latest monologue When Billy Met Alasdair, by contrast, has no truck with any tourist notions of Scotland, but instead looks back in yearning to the 1980s, a decade marked by a huge explosion of vitality in Scottish culture. Comedian and showbiz legend Billy Connolly, and the novelist and artist Alasdair Gray, were both titans of that period; and Bissett’s show is inspired by a single surviving photograph of Connolly and Gray together at the 1981 Glasgow llaunch of Gray’s mighty novel Lanark.

Bissett imagines the conversation they might have shared, that night, about key figures in Scottish culture; and also reflects on the the sheer dogged persistence which enabled them to carve their way through obscurity and poverty towards creative fulfilment.

His version of Alasdair Gray is poignantly convincing, his expansive Billy Connolly – hosting an A-List Hollywood party – a little less so. And at times, Bissett almost seems beset by despair; in a work which talks of the need to keep pushing on into the future, as Connolly and Gray would urge us to do, but sometimes seems seduced by the famously disempowering temptation simply to lament a lost past.

Skye: A Thriller runs until 25 August; When Billy Met Alasdair runs until until 23 August

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