Sleeping Beauty

Pantomime is huge in Scotland.  And by pantomime I don't mean people with white faces pretending to walk into winds. I mean panto, with men dressed up as women and they're behind you and variety acts appearing for very tenuous reasons. If you don't know, then please go and google it.

Anyway, in the late eighties, as the boom in alternative cabaret raged, the Tron theatre in Glasgow decided to start doing alternative pantos. The poster byline for this version of Sleeping Beauty was 'Young, Gifted, Asleep'. It was written by Craig Fergusson (later the talk show sensation in the States) and Peter Capaldi (later Doctor Who). It premiered at the Tron Theatre, Glasgow in December 1986 with Forbes Masson and I taking our Victor and Barry characters and turning them into the pantomime dames, Victoria and Barathea. It was my first time in drag.  I am not a pretty girl.

Mr. Government

Mr Government was a new play by Stuart Paterson about life in a rural community in Ayrshire.

I played Donal, a boy with learning difficulties, and I remember that this was the first time that I actually understood acting.  I don't know how to describe it. Something clicked, or loosened up, or I let go in some way. Whatever, one day on stage, I just sort of had a breakthrough and realized that I could inhabit this person and it wasn't really like the acting I had been doing or had thought I had to do up to that point. I just felt that something opened inside me and I was more connected to the character. So I have a special fondness for this play and the experience I had. I got to work with great Scottish actresses like Caroline Paterson and Juliet Cadzow, and again with Martin Black who had been in Macbeth.

Funnily enough, many years later this play would be reworked and produced again at the Traverse Theatre as King of the Fields, directed by John Tiffany who directed me in The Bacchae and Macbeth over twenty years later.

A Streetcar Named Desire

A Streetcar Named Desire by Tennessee Williams was the second play in my Royal Lyceum, Edinburgh repertory season.

I just love this play, and am so glad that I got to know it intimately at such a young age. I played two parts - the Young Collector and the Doctor who takes Blanche away at the end.

I remember the first preview we did. There was a custom that first preview audiences got in for free, so it was a really excited and excitable crowd. When I came on as the Young Collector people actually whistled, and when Blanche kissed me the place went nuts!

Every night as soon as I had been kissed by Blanche, who was played by Vivien Heilbron, I rushed upstairs to my dressing room and began the startling transformation into the Doctor. I really went to town: glasses, white hair, lines, moustache, the lot. All my make-up training at RSAMD was well-used. Check it out! Once, when one of the other actors was stuck on the motorway from Glasgow, I had to play Pablo too!

Tartuffe

Tartuffe is a great play by Molière, and this production, my first as part of a season of plays at the Royal Lyceum Theatre in Edinburgh, was a new Scots adaptation by the brilliant poet and playwright Liz Lochead.

I played the young lover, Valere. I was so excited to work at the Lyceum and be a part of a repertory company, and be in such a great play.