Review: Wallace – A Play, A Pie & A Pint

Rob Drummond and Dave Hook strip Scotland’s most familiar legend to its bones, rebuilding William Wallace in fifty minutes of argument, rhythm and rap.

A legend re-examined

Few figures in Scottish history have travelled so far, or been bent into so many shapes, as William Wallace. He has been sung as hero, claimed as martyr, projected worldwide as Mel Gibson’s blue-painted freedom fighter; he even went to my old school!

Wallace, part of this season’s A Play, A Pie and A Pint, takes that legend and presses it hard. Written by Rob Drummond, with music and lyrics by Dave Hook, it is less a retelling than an interrogation: what is record, what is invention, and why does the myth still matter?

The pulse of rap, the weight of Scots

Three performers spar over Wallace’s meaning, their arguments slipping into rap where rhetoric accelerates and Scots cadences strike like percussion. Hook’s score fuses hip hop beats with the swing of Scots speech, producing a language that feels both modern and rooted.

Rap may have its origins in Black America, but here it is no import. Scots – with its clipped vowels and rolling consonants – lends itself naturally to the beat. What might have seemed a collision emerges as a partnership, urgent and witty, belonging equally to oral history and to the hip hop stage.

Staging pared to the bone

Orla O’Loughlin’s direction keeps the focus tight. A bare stage, shifts of light and sound, and the momentum of word and rhythm are all that is needed. The result is lean and insistent, a show that lives or dies on pace and performance.

This minimalism feels apt. Wallace is more idea than man, endlessly re-fashioned. By stripping away spectacle, the production mirrors that process, leaving only arguments and inviting us to judge what is flesh, what invention.

Performances that spark and collide

The triangular chemistry is key. Patricia Panther commands with gravitas and a voice that anchors the argument. Manasa Tagica cuts through with mischief and precision, finding humour without weakening the point. Dave Hook, writer and performer, provides the steady line, testing his own words in delivery while letting the others blaze.

The result is part gig, part debate, part rap battle. One moment confrontational, the next playful, voices overlap and rhythms collide. The format risks repetition – debate into rap, rap back into debate – but personality and presence keep the cycle alive.

Whose history?

Beneath the surface energy lie sharper questions. How much of Wallace’s tale is historical fact, and how much embroidered by centuries of retelling? Why do certain myths endure, and what do they reveal about those who cling to them?

The piece also points to the silences. Women, the poor, voices beyond the dominant account are almost wholly absent from Wallace’s story as usually told. By highlighting what is missing, the play broadens the lens: Wallace becomes less an individual than a case study in how nations construct memory, who is remembered, and who is written out.

Strengths and limits of the format

Fifty minutes does not allow for every thread to be pulled, and the cyclical structure can verge on schematic. Yet the same limits give the piece its vitality: a tight frame, an insistence on pace, and a refusal to indulge. In less than an hour, it provokes, entertains, and reframes a national icon with bracing originality.

A legend made live

What remains is not a complete portrait of Wallace but a recognition that history is fluid. Legends shift with each retelling, shaped by the politics of the present. By setting Scots verse to rap beats, Drummond and Hook show that myth is not inherited whole but remade, nightly, in performance.

Playful yet serious, musical yet muscular, Wallace takes one of Scotland’s most familiar figures and dares to make him strange again.