Theatre reviews: Whaur's Yer Wullie Shakespeare Noo? | Do Not Pass Go

Whaur’s Yer Wullie Shakespeare Noo?, Oran Mor, Glasgow ★★★

Do Not Pass Go, Platform, Easterhouse ★★★

History is more or less bunk, said US automobile tycoon Henry Ford. Bunk or not, though, it’s certainly full of rattling good yarns, both appealing and appalling; and the latest lunchtime A Play, A Pie and A Pint drama – written and directed by PPP’s multi-talented artistic director Brian Logan – revisits one of the more embarrassing episodes in Scotland’s cultural history, when 18th-century Edinburgh went wild for a play called Douglas, by young Church of Scotland minister John Home.

Douglas – first seen in Edinburgh in 1756 – is a high-flown romantic tragedy, set in the Highlands, about young Norval, the long-lost son of Lady Randolph, who becomes a hero in battle, but dies tragically in the end; and although it was written in standard English (one reason why upwardly mobile 18th-century Edinburgh deemed it superior), it famously inspired one Scots-speaking theatre-goer to a ringing cry of “Whaur’s yer Wullie Shakespeare noo?”

That single phrase, of course, captures both Scotland’s deep-seated cultural inferiority complex, and the brief moments of overblown self-glorification that tend to punctuate it; and Logan’s play emerges as a fairly traditional but often highly entertaining historical drama, for an all-male cast of four, about the high enthusiasm for the play among Enlightenment Edinburgh figures such as David Hume and Alexander Carlyle. It celebrates their boldness in encouraging Home to present Douglas in the unlicensed Canongate Playhouse; and becomes intrigued by the fierce ideological battle that ensued between the moderate Enlightenment party in the kirk, and Presbyterian fundamentalists like Rev. John Witherspoon, a future founding father of the United States played with great flair by Gavin Jon Wright.

Eventually, Home bowed to kirk regulations against the devilish arts of the theatre, resigned his ministry, and headed south towards a mediocre play-writing career in London. In Edinburgh, through, the forces of Enlightenment were finally winning the argument. Logan’s intriguing and curious play – which also features fine performances from Lewie Watson, Kevin Lennon and Fraser Sivewright – offers a playful but respectful glimpse of a hugely neglected slice of Scottish history, all written in a strong and wide-ranging Scots that many Edinburgh Enlightenment figures would doubtless have called barbarous, while of course speaking it with great fluency and power themselves.

Melanie Jordan, Diane Thornton, Amy Helena in Do Not Pass Go

There’s more history on stage in Jordan & Skinner’s latest touring show Do Not Pass Go – although here it comes with less tentative curiosity, and more pure agitprop energy. The show tells the story of US writer and inventor Lizzie Magie, who in 1904 invented her “Landlord’s Game”, now known worldwide as Monopoly. Lizzie was something of a socialist, and a “single tax” campaigner. Her game therefore offered one set of rules where the monopolist wins, and another where resources are distributed more fairly. It became very popular in radical circles, though it was never available commercially.

In Do Not Pass Go, though, director Caitlin Skinner and her creative partner, the performer Melanie Jordan, come together with two other cast members to tell how, in the hungry 1930s, a man called Charles Darrow stole the details of Lizzie’s game, and sold it for a million dollars – minus the single-tax option, of course – to a leading board-game manufacturer.

The style of the show’s storytelling is, frankly, fragmented, a mix of projected slogans and information, chunks of narrative sometimes told in chaotic competition (through BSL as well as voice monologues), and illustrative movement sequences which are both vivid and slightly over-long. And if the whole sorry tale of Lizzie Magie and her invention could be told more tightly and briefly, with greater impact, it still has a terrible, vivid resonance about it; embodying this generation’s fury not only for Lizzie, but for all the millions of brilliant women written out of our inventive and creative history, since time immemorial.

Whaur’s yer Wullie Shakespeare Noo? is at the Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh, 6-10 October, and the Lemon Tree, Aberdeen, 13-17 October. Do Not Pass Go is on tour across Scotland until 7 November; details at www.jordanandskinner.com​

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