“Powerful, joyful, sensitive and skillfully woven, Gary McNair’s Dear Billy is verbatim theatre of the highest order, and a gorgeous celebration of the Big Yin.”
📍 Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh
📅 18 May – 20 May 2023
🕖 7:30pm
🕖 Running time: 90 minutes Minutes (no interval)
🖊️ Writer: Gary McNair
🎬 Director: Joe Douglas
🛠️ Set & Costume Designer: Claire Halleran
💡 Lighting Designers: Kate Bonney & Simon Hayes
🎼 Composers: Simon Liddell & Jill O’Sullivan
🎂 12+
🎭 Wheelchair Accessible Venue, Wheelchair Accessible Toilets, Audio Induction Loop
Ninety minutes of uniquely Scottish banter, Gary McNair’s Dear Billy, offers a masterfully woven tapestry of stories gathered from across Scotland. Stories about, inspired by, and imagined about the one, the only Billy Connolly. It’s one thing for the 4 strong team of Robbie Gordon, Jacqueline Houston, Genevieve Jagger, and Jamie Marie Leary to have tirelessly scoured the country for hundreds (thousands?) of Billy-related opinions, anecdotes and wild musings, but quite another to tame that surfeit into a performable work.
It could so easily fail; could so easily be only a narrated cultural research project. So hats of to writer/performer McNair and director Joe Douglas, because Dear Billy is so much more. Channelling more than impersonating the story donors, McNair strikes a somewhat mercurial figure, a merry shaman conducting a folk ritual with an ensorceled audience. Voices from around the saltire realm emerge in a free, but never chaotic order, creating a reverently irreverent love letter to one of Scotland’s favourite sons.
Unsurprisingly there’s much to laugh at – much – in Dear Billy, but this is theatre, not scripted stand-up. Instead this is an invitation to national catharsis, a great big, communal ‘Thank You’ to the irreplaceable, inimitable Billy Connolly. A thank you painted in c- and f-words, personal encounters, imaginings, and (mostly) good natured ribbing. There are even some stories from people who weren’t one of Billy’s 500,000 former classmates or their sister’s brother’s best-friend.
The show also immensely benefits from on-stage musicians Simon Liddell & Jill O’Sullivan, who deftly soundtrack proceedings in shades of Country music and non-hokey tartan tones. A few well-conceived collaborations between all three on stage shade the performance with the lightest of abstraction, a clever antidote to stories shaving closest to ‘tribute-act’ moments. McNair even has a banjo to hand, though to answer the ‘will he, won’t he’ play it question, you’ll have to go find out for yourself. Claire Halleran’s set is also a delight, a pastiche working man’s club stage, replete with stand-up mics, and icon-inspired neon sculptures thanks to Kate Bonney & Simon Hayes.
Now it’s worth notiing that McNair is free to change the stories at each performance, so there’s an inbuilt organic life to Dear Billy. A living, breathing accalamtion of a living, breathing (sorry Billy) national treasure from our national theatre seems completely appropriate. Powerful, joyful, sensitive and skillfully woven, Gary McNair’s Dear Billy is verbatim theatre of the highest order, and a gorgeous celebration of the Big Yin.
Dear Billy plays the Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh until the 20th May 2023 before continuing on national tour. It is produced by the National Theatre of Scotland.
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