Scotland’s funniest non-comedian
A Gambler’s Guide to Dying (Traverse) Beautiful storytelling ★★★★✩
WRITER, director, and performer Gary McNair has garnered plenty of rave reviews for his work since graduating from the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland eight years ago.
Here, he returns to the Traverse with this simple, but effective and moving, solo show with production company Show and Tell, delivered with his customary blend of poignant, engaging, theatrical storytelling and character comedy.
McNair has been described as ‘Scotland’s funniest non-comedian’ – and it’s easy to see why as, like a young Billy Connolly, he sallies back and forth between wistfulness and profundity in a show about life being for living. It has charm to burn and is jam-packed with golden nuggets of observations on life, love, the universe and our place in it.
The catalyst for the tale is a bet the narrator’s grandfather placed on England winning the World Cup in 1966. A triumph of sorts that didn’t go down too well in the pub he frequented in the Gorbals. Later, when he was diagnosed with cancer, he placed another bet that he would live to see the Millennium. Here, we are clearly shown, is a man who liked a challenge.
Between these two poles, McNair spins out his finely crafted yarn, as he switches back in time to assume different characters, including that of the schoolboy who idolised his grandfather and loved his tall tales of falling in the Clyde and coming up with a salmon in his mouth.
Even though, as he points out at the beginning of the monologue, which is played out on a sparse sitting room set littered with cardboard boxes, to oth- ers his grandfather ‘ was also liar, cheat, addict, storyteller, hero’.
The show is McNair’s attempt to get not so much at the truth of a life. After all, that depends on your vantage point. ‘ The details, the facts, they’ve become blurred, like soft focus in an old movie,’ he says. But rather to sift shorthand memories and blurred remembrances to arrive at some sort of summing up of the essence of one particular man, the life he lived, how he lived it and why he lived it that way – and the narrator’s small bit part in it.
Luck, probability and why the house always wins when it comes to death are very much to the fore. But so, too, are love and an appreciation of the time we have and the people we choose to spend it with, despite their faults.
A warm, heartfelt, beautiful piece of writing and storytelling.
Traverse until Aug 30