Shona Cowie is wee theatrical treasure, long live the demon PowerPoint sing-along!
📍Scottish Storytelling Centre
📅 Aug 4-28
🕖 4:45pm
🕖 Running time (approx.): 55 minutes
👥 Creator: Shona Cowie
🎬 Producers: Shona Cowie and Neil Sutcliffe
💰 From £10.00
🎂 16+
🎭 Wheelchair Accessible Venue, Wheelchair Accessible Toilet
Shona Cowie’s show, With the Devil’s Assistance, almost defies description. One part presentation on the state of the modern high-street, one part character-driven re-telling of an Ayrshire legend pertaining to Maggie Osborne, alleged Witch, and inn-keeper.
55 talent-filled minutes in the company of Shona, and multi-instrumentalist Neil Sutcliffe traces an unlikely path from PowerPoint slide-show, a touch of delightful audience Q&A, and then back in time to meet Maggie, and a cadre of imagined Ayrshire contemporaries. The atmosphere is warm, and infused with a particularly Scottish welcome. The music, much of it extemporised floats from background to fore, a spirit with real agency in Cowie’s production.
There’s unquestionable storytelling talent here, and when Cowie takes on her cast of characters — she plays every single one — each is etched with unique, and recognisable body language, voice, and mannerism. When she conjures an Ayr marketplace, she moves almost genie like amongst her creation, building houses, stalls, and the beasts that oink and bray amidst the sellers. Peeking through windows, she tells of Maggie’s house, now replaced by Marks & Spencers, on Ayr Highstreet, a time when shops weren’t closing, and their windows shone unbroken.
This is full body storytelling, and The QR is here for it.
Her Maggie is imagined as an entrepreneur, a woman with capitalist nous; a lady who’d be CEO of M&S where she alive today. Instead of celebration, she is soon subject to speculation that she is a witch with otherworldly powers; a shape-shifter bringing ruin on those she despises. Her house, locals claimed, was erected in one night through a deal with Auld Nick.
In burning her alive, Cowie wryly suggests, perhaps that deal with the Devil fell through, and an empty high street was the consequence.
Ultimately the play’s central thesis isn’t spelled out in black & white, the audience left to puzzle over the pieces so artfully placed before them. Such is the clever crafting of the narrative, so pleasant is the journey, this lack of finality isn’t unwelcome, an invitation to think on the show long after the lights come up.
You’ll not see anything else like With the Devil’s Assistance at this year’s Edinburgh Fringe. You’d be daft to miss it. Sure there are a couple of slightly awkward scene transitions, and maybe the mic’s could get switched off when either Cowie or Sutcliffe are ‘off stage’, but these are minor gripes given the fabulousness of this show.
The storytelling is great, the music a treat, the story engrossing, and well, any theatre-maker who can make PowerPoint a strength of the show has to be a wee genius.
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