Kes leaves the bird to audience’s imagination
be the Scottish Plainsong Choir, pianist Brian Davidson, the Ferntower Ensemble and renowned jazz maestro Richard Michael. Full details are on the Kirk website www.st-johns-kirk.co.uk
Now entering its ninth year, St John’s Music also features regular organ recitals, usually on the first Saturday of the month at 1pm.
The current season was launched at the beginning of this month by American concert organist Dr Jane Gamble, a musician who gave the very first concert under the St John’s Music banner back in 2011.
Subsequent Saturday lunchtime organ recitals will be given by John Riley (Edinburgh), Aaron Hawthorne (young theatre organist of the year 2019, Glasgow), Claire Innes-Hopkins (University of St Andrews), Howard Duthie (St John’s Kirk of Perth), Andrew Forbes (Glasgow Cathedral) and Hans Uwe Hielscher (Marktkirche, Wiesbaden, Germany).
There is no admission charge at any of these musical events, but retiring donations are always invited.
Horsecross artistic director and director of Perth Theatre’s latest original production Kes, Lu Kemp spoke to the PA about the practicalities of bringing Ken Loach’s unforgettable film to the stage.
“It was always going to be a problem depicting a wild bird,” explained Lu. “The kestrel is the co-star with our young protagonist, Billy, so a starting dilemma was how to show it.
“We decided not to, to ask the audience to picture Kes in their minds, it seemed the most powerful way to make it real. We could have used an animatronic bird, but we let it exist in each person’s imagination, it works better I think.”
Such a move puts a great deal onto the shoulders of actor Danny Hughes, who plays the young Yorkshire lad who steals a kestrel chick and trains the bird to hunt its prey, before tragedy strikes and his dream is cruelly shattered. Danny plays 15-year-old Billy Casper, a hugely isolated teenager who turns away from the trouble he experiences at home and the inevitable future he will face working in the coal pits.
Perthshire audiences will have come across Danny already on stage in recent times. He was a key young actor in the 2018 NTS production examining the soldiers executed for cowardice in the Great War, ‘The 306: Dusk’ by Oliver Emanuel.
The action takes place in the critical few weeks before Billy finishes school and he is streamed into the only employment on offer in the area. Against this pressurising background the teen puts his whole focus into the bird of prey.
Lu said: “Billy says a lot about where he’s at with his body: he never looks adults in the eye, but with Kes on his arm, he’s so active, alive and fulfilled.”
In a recent poll of Ken Loach’s 20 best films, Kes (1969) came in at number one. For decades, school children were shown the movie which spoke to their age group.
“Ken Loach’s film is totally brilliant,” continued Lu. “As a work on film it captures movement and space.
“I’m really feeling elated that we in Perth took this opportunity to do this stage version.
“We’ve worked very hard to encapsulate the look and feel of the 1970s, when it was set.
“Kes is about poverty, the mining life well before the time when the pits were closed, a boy totally without a social network, when young people didn’t have access to even a telephone.
“This time and place is within our collective living memory, it is about what being a teenager is like. Kes embraces the universal loneliness of that time in life.”
Kes is playing from October 31 to November 16 in Perth’s Joan Knight Studio Theatre.
Tickets can be purchased from www.horsecross. co.uk or call the box office on 01738 621031.